Maria Kozak Polish, b. 1981

Maria Kozak is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in upstate New York and Warsaw, Poland.

 

Her drawings and paintings are intuited, psychological landscapes whose figures exist beyond the

conventional boundaries of time and space. They depict various relationships with the self, others and the sublime. Driven by both existential inquiries into the nature of reality, and the construction of society, Kozak's work embraces the full spectrum of human experience, from the sacred to the profane. It offers a light-hearted approach to social commentary by balancing whimsy and melancholy.

 

Descended from a long line of dowsers, alchemists and Polish mystics, she believes in an undercurrent of energy creating and connecting all things. These subtle frequencies are always present in an effort to make the unseen, seen. Her work is characterized by dissolving forms, layered narratives and ambiguity. The landscapes begin digitally, as drawings on her tablet. She pushes and pulls at an abstract field of color as she finds shapes and forms in an excavation of sorts. Prone to pareidolia, figures begin to emerge. These drawings are then manipulated, cut out and pasted into endless layers of color combinations, often remixing them with other drawings until she is satisfied with the composition. They exist as numerous files and multiple realities before becoming large-scale canvases creating a morphology that lives between screens and the physical world. She wields paint with a technical versatility that showcases her deep understanding of the medium, thin washes create atmospheric depth while textured impasto passages provide moments of sensual materiality. The paintings operate in that fertile territory between recognition and mystery, presenting viewers with characters who feel simultaneously familiar and unknowable. These ambiguous protagonists, caught in moments of undefined action, function as emotional surrogates through which Kozak explores contemporary anxieties about identity, connection, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between our internal and external realities. Her work continues traditions of German Expressionism, Surrealism, psychedelia and the transavantgarde. 

 

Her work is found in collections nationally and abroad and has been mentioned in Artsy, the Wall Street Journal, Cool Hunting and Surface magazine. She has shown most recently at LETO Gallery in Warsaw, Dreamsong in Minneapolis and The Detroit Public Library. She was awarded a NYFA /NYSCA Grant and a Schusterman Foundation Fellowship for her work in emerging technology.

 

She has a Master’s degree in painting from the New York Academy of Art and is an alumni of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art + technology. She is also currently the Editor-at-large of Przekrój, Poland’s oldest culture magazine.