Maria Szakats’ work is informed by her decade long career as a designer in the fashion industry. In an aim to explore meaning in a textile form in a deeper sense, she continues to utilise the raw materials and crafts of her design practice. Wholeheartedly assuming the household feminist artistic aesthetics, she sincerely rejoices in the use of a so-called feminine medium, applying ancestral skills of textile fabrication and appreciating them for their practical and aesthetic qualities.
In her most recent works Szakats animates allegories of human nature through the embroidered image, following the traditions of animal and plant fables found in medieval and renaissance tapestry. By creating a contemporary panoply of allegorical figures, she speaks of the fractalized personal interior, while the human body is absent. This long, meditative method of creation has a sense of the transcendental: hours of repetitive stitching of colours into the cotton canvas forming blocks, then shapes, then formal interactions.
Finally, the embroidered textile surface is treated with a metal brush, blurring the image, and giving a painterly quality to the works.
Maria Szakats (1984, Romania) is an Austrian designer and visual artist who works primarily with textile. She has an MFA from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and is living and working in Paris, France. By utilising a wide array of technical skills with which she produces works combining textiles and installation, she attempts to create a tension between craft, material, image and space. Even though attracted to the banality of techniques like knitting, embroidery and crochet, she intends to create a visual impact which is separating the work from any expected notions. Most recently, she presented the solo exhibitions at Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, at Brooke Benington, London and at Galerie Chloe Salgado in Paris.
