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Mária Švarbová

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There is often a sense of cool detachment and liminality in Mária’s work. Routine actions such as exercise, doctor appointments, and domestic tasks are reframed with a visual purity that is soothing and symmetrical and at times reverberant with an ethereal stillness. The overall effect evokes a contemplative silence in an extended moment of promise and awareness — a quality difficult to achieve in the rapid pace of modern life.

Mária’s postmodern vision boldly articulates a dialogue that compels the viewer to respond to the mystery, loneliness, and isolation of the human experience. Nevertheless, deeply embedded within the aqueous pastels, Mária’s compositions hold to a celebratory elegance that transforms the viewer’s gaze into an enduring reverence for life’s simple beauty.

Series 1. Swimming pool

The atmosphere that depicts through a palette of pastel and overexposed tonnes projects the spectator into a sanitized world in which the characters have chosen to give up any kind of extravagance that might unmask them.

Like inert and robotic figurines, they rigidly evolve from one photograph to the next without parading their feelings. Time seems to have stopped and the swimmers have no other idea than to see themselves reflected in the perfectly still water of the swimming pool. Reworking the concept of the photo novel that originated through a combination of cinema and comic strips, her photographs are a succession of short scenes in which the frontality and absence of contrasts remove any narrative dimension in favour of the fullness of the photographic surface.

Photography portfolio

swimming pool photographer portfolio

The use of retouching software allows her to master this careful and stringent aesthetic with extreme precision, attenuating differences as though all individuals were the same, losing all of their individuality and identity.

Swimming pool by Maria Svarbova

Swimming Pool by maria Svarbova

Series 2. Plastic World

In Plastic World, Mária Švarbová's subjects act as emotionless mannequins. Through blank stares, stiff poses and total absence of emotion, the series challenges the viewer to question the ingrained roles people play in society. 

Every image flows into another scene forming the overall narrative of the series — the emptiness and mindless inability to change one's predetermined role in life in the absence of emotion. Complex and dreamy, Plastic World presents an imaginary world (inspired by historic artefacts and environments of Communist Czechoslovakia).

Plastic world by Maria Svarbova. Portfoliobox blog


Mária Svarbová | Photographer based in Slovakia
Website: www.mariasvarbova.com
Instagram: @maria.svarbova
Facebook: @mariasvarbova
 

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