Maria Anto, STILL NATURE FOR AN ANGEL, 1983

94.0 x 124.0 cm - oil, canvas Signed on reverse on canvas: Maria Anto 1983 "M.N. FOR ANGEL" | 92 x 125 cm | 845 [in circle], at l. edge: Maria Anto 1968 [crossed out] 125 x 92 | 321 [crossed out].



Provenance:

Private collection, Sweden.



Maria Anto's extraordinary oeuvre - described as fantasy-themed figuration - remains a separate phenomenon in Polish contemporary art. As a great erudite woman with a "head full of poems," she drew freely on a wide repertoire of symbols, through which she visualized intimate content: memories, emotions, the routine of everyday life. These themes are also latent in her still-life depictions, whose iconography is based on fixed motifs such as an angel, birds, a mountain, a house, books, porcelain figurines and decorative glass vessels (see, among others, Still Life with Silver, 1983, 90 x 130 cm; Still Life with Stone Head, 1987, 90 x 130 cm). They are also united by a characteristic way of arranging space that involves situating the imagined scene at the junction of the interior of the house and the open landscape. Often, as in "our" painting, it is additionally framed by an internal frame in the form of parted folds of a curtain bringing to mind associations with theatrical scenery. The viewer is admitted into a mysterious, deformed and surreal world, where perspective is distorted and objects are scaled. The background is a red-gray sky appropriate for the time between day and night. Susanna Janin, a visual artist and daughter of Maria Anto, pointed out that both the type of lighting and the suggestive closing of the paintings' composition were common features of many of the painter's paintings: I noticed that they all had similar lighting - a bit muted, such a gray hour, twilight, between day and night or vice versa (...) Even if she painted an interior, it opened up and showed the landscape. Different perspectives and views were superimposed. The horizon and just the sun, which was never noon, strong, just setting, unseen. Even her trips to brightened, sunny Italy, during the time she worked with the Galleria Cortina in Milan, did not change much in terms of this specific light. (...) For this, she often painted red clouds. I think that through this open landscape with trees, which are also present in the interiors (or vice versa - in parks, landscapes appear detached buildings, and then things and people in a glass ball or cube), she expressed a sense of danger and a desire to find security. Home was something extremely important to her. (Zuzanna Janin is interviewed by Michal Jachula [in:] Maria Anto. Painter, Zacheta 2017, pp. 30-34)

Still Life with Angel, presented in the catalog, is a work filled with a magical and fairy-tale aura, in which the artist poetically encoded the memory of her own feelings and experiences in an exceptionally visually appealing form.



♣ An additional fee will be added to the Purchase Price based on the right of the creator and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Law of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite).





Maria Anto (alias Czarnecka-Antoszkiewicz, born in Warsaw on December 15, 1936) studied at the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under Stefan Płużanski and Michal Bylina. She received her diploma in 1960 and participated in the Sao Paulo Art Biennale in 1963. She regularly exhibited in the country. She quickly developed her own painting style, poetics and mood, which distinguish her paintings from her contemporaries. The limp, ethereal figures in her paintings, close to the work of primitives, are found in unreal landscapes and interiors, far from the rules of perspective, but close to the logic of daydreams. The fairy-tale, dreamlike aura of the scenes she paints is also emphasized by dark colors, sometimes brightened by violent streaks of light. During martial law, Maria Anto participated in independent artistic life. She exhibited her works at church and private exhibitions (including the cyclical "Encounters with Art" at the Divine Mercy parish on Żytnia Street in Warsaw). Later she returned to her typical poetics, somewhat akin to naive painting.