maria klabin

Maria Klabin's (b. 1978, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) work engages with scenes, occurrences, and landscapes that permeate everyday life and thus, have been seen and experienced exhaustively. In dealing with omnipresent elements, Klabin extracts the cadence of their recurrence, seeking to capture the formal rhythm embedded in the repetition, or banality, of their existence. The artist’s process lays in constantly producing and assembling drawings, photographs, and annotations, which she draws from her immediate entourage. The accumulation of thoughts and images entwine and come to make sense as a whole, unveiling intriguing relations that form the backbone of the artist's pictorial endeavor. In her own words, Klabin develops her work ‘as if writing a story, or a diary, but a diary of things that don’t really happen. It’s a narrative that could only be told through painting, but that touches themes that seem closer to writers than to painters.’

Maria Klabin oscillates between extremes in terms of the scale of her works, producing both very small and monumental, large scale paintings, depending on the nature of her subject. Her small canvases often serve as support for rapid streams of thought—like writing on paper, perhaps harnessing an unconscious mind—and effectively capturing the rhythm of her surroundings, while her large pieces embody more contemplative, oneiric perceptions. Most recently, Klabin has produced a series of almost mural-sized landscape paintings that depart from fragments of autobiographical elements, distilled from what she describes as an improbable and fluid patchwork of memory, that results in non-objectifiable, enticing yet daunting compositions. 

Maria Klabin lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She studied Visual Arts and Art History at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, USA, where she was awarded the Susan May Green Award for painting. In 2002, she earned an MA from Central Saint Martins – University of the Arts London, in London, UK. Solo exhibitions include: Liquid Air, at Nara Roesler (2022), in New York, USA; Paisagem com Casinha, at Galeria Silvia Cintra (2021), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Entre Rio e Pedra, at Galeria Silvia Cintra (2017), in Rio de Janeiro,  Brazil; E o dia havia acabado, quando começou, at Galeria Silvia Cintra (2014), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; amongst others. Group exhibitions include: Abrasive Paradise, at Kunsthal KADE (2022), in Amstersfoort, The Netherlands; Já estava assim quando eu cheguei, at Ron Mandos (2020), in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Festival de Arte Contemporânea, at SESC VideoBrasil (2012/13), in São Paulo, Brazil; Novas Aquisições da Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand, at Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) (2012), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Rumos 2005/06 Paradoxos Brasil, at Itaú Cultural (2006), in São Paulo, Brazil; Além da Imagem, at Paço Imperial (2006), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; amongst others. Her works are also part of important institutional collections, such as Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil.