""Берег"
Бумага, акварель
70×50см.

The "Sun" settled in the granite walls of Vyborg Castle.
The exhibition of watercolors by St. Petersburg artist Maria Kviklis "The Sun" was opened in Vyborg Castle. This is a chamber exhibition, in which only 33 works were presented.

Now she works mainly in the style of minimalism and abstract expressionism. As the artist herself says, sensuality and emotions prevail in her paintings.

Vladislav Bugaev, artist, teacher

The Red Dwarf Diptych
Paper, watercolor
120 x 80 cm

"Flight"
Paper, watercolor
80 x 60 cm

"Solar Wind"
Paper, watercolor
75 x 105 cm

"Balance"
Paper, watercolor
60 x 80 cm

Blue diffused light
Paper, watercolor
60 x 80 cm

"The White Dwarf"
Paper, watercolor
60 x 80 cm

2019 г. -

"Солнце"

With her exhibition, which is called "The Sun", Maria touched on many aspects. This topic is historically the oldest that can be in the culture of mankind. Solar symbols are inherent in all cultures and peoples. It is impossible to do without them. This is the first sacred essence, the most important

Colleagues note that Maria's works are characterized by a "universal view" that goes beyond Euclidean space and the world in which we exist.

seldon news.

"In the solar space of Maria Kviklis, the transition from the macrocosm to the micro begins, the viewer turns into an artist, and the paintings give an impulse for a mental journey to the one that is the whole, where the apparent lack of logic and linearity plunges into infinity," the museum group reports.

It is clarified that the paintings are made in the style of minimalism and abstract expressionism, representing a painting that does not recreate images of reality, but expresses the unconscious activity of the artist exploring the ability to see large and small as parts of the whole

""Берег"
Бумага, акварель
70×50см.

Dream back

In the space occupied by the work of Maria Kviklis the climate changes, the emotional thermometer goes up the scale, the tension of the meaning and colour field rises…

The central idea of this exhibition is in a region lying at the intersection of the visual and verbal, depiction and literature. Moving on to literary sources does not lead the artist to 'literariness', which is an abusive term in relation to painting, but reveals a channel for philosophical and artistic investigations. It does not lead directly to the letter and plot of a text. The young artist uses own life experience pari passu with own literary history.

Maria addresses to problems of time, memoirs and dreams appealing to the past. Green fantastic little men, dogs and rabbits come from the childhood. Extending spaces, sea coast, woods and the house remind of a youth. Bright and fresh impressions of recent times reverberate. Pendulums and clocks fix a flight of time, abstract streams of energy. Plunging into the psychology of trauma suffered by every personality, the artist sees its source in the traps set by time – the image of the malevolent timepiece, is treated by Maria as the scaffold of time as a collage of numberless clock-faces. Feeling in the moment, we are in no condition to understand ourselves transcendentally. But the wizard Time covers left events with pinkish smoke, all troubles are forgotten and the dreams of the past become complex and ambiguous.

Acryllic serves to fix the object in its inner form. The object and reality itself easily becomes transparent and visible space flickers through the space of the invisible. Maria approaches this task through visual devices, employing practical, optical effects. The object of representation approaches the eye, the borders move beyond the limits of peripheral vision, and it becomes almost abstract, combining colours and stains. The lack of a desire to grow up and a fear of facing the truth suffers in the concentrated colour of experience: it explodes in a blinding red, cools in violet, gives off heat in yellow and flows down in sky blue tears.

The object emerges into a huge space blazing high in the sky above rooftops and trees. Zoom-effects shift from the microworld to the macroworld, little animal figures are scattered in a vortex, like the coloured fleks of a kalaidoscope, or skip like series in animation stuck inside a cine-projector. At some moment the film heats up again, the image swells, blisters from the heat and catches fire, giving off a pure light. The inner flame of colors cleanses the soul, there is no dirt and decay in in this zone, it is clean. The eyes of spiritual essences emerge from this flame, wise, calm, but the echo of hot ashes still beat in the heart.
This road can be seen as a metaphor and visualisation of the creative process, the experience of knowing the 'I', that alone can give a sense of genuine freedom from time.


Dr. Artem Magalashvili, art critic.

"Kaleidoscope"
Paper, watercolor, acrylic

"Temporary Hills"
Paper, watercolor, collage
50 x 70

"Souls of puppies"
Paper, watercolor, tempera
Private collection

"Rabbit Lands"
Paper, watercolor, tempera
70 × 50 cm

"House on the hill"
Paper, watercolor
70×50 cm
Private collection

2011. Exhibition space "Turun kristillinen opisto", Turku, Finland

""Берег"
Бумага, акварель
70×50см.

Dream back

In the space occupied by the work of Maria Kviklis the climate changes, the emotional thermometer goes up the scale, the tension of the meaning and colour field rises…

The central idea of this exhibition is in a region lying at the intersection of the visual and verbal, depiction and literature. Moving on to literary sources does not lead the artist to 'literariness', which is an abusive term in relation to painting, but reveals a channel for philosophical and artistic investigations. It does not lead directly to the letter and plot of a text. The young artist uses own life experience pari passu with own literary history.

Maria addresses to problems of time, memoirs and dreams appealing to the past. Green fantastic little men, dogs and rabbits come from the childhood. Extending spaces, sea coast, woods and the house remind of a youth. Bright and fresh impressions of recent times reverberate. Pendulums and clocks fix a flight of time, abstract streams of energy. Plunging into the psychology of trauma suffered by every personality, the artist sees its source in the traps set by time – the image of the malevolent timepiece, is treated by Maria as the scaffold of time as a collage of numberless clock-faces. Feeling in the moment, we are in no condition to understand ourselves transcendentally. But the wizard Time covers left events with pinkish smoke, all troubles are forgotten and the dreams of the past become complex and ambiguous.

Acryllic serves to fix the object in its inner form. The object and reality itself easily becomes transparent and visible space flickers through the space of the invisible. Maria approaches this task through visual devices, employing practical, optical effects. The object of representation approaches the eye, the borders move beyond the limits of peripheral vision, and it becomes almost abstract, combining colours and stains. The lack of a desire to grow up and a fear of facing the truth suffers in the concentrated colour of experience: it explodes in a blinding red, cools in violet, gives off heat in yellow and flows down in sky blue tears.

The object emerges into a huge space blazing high in the sky above rooftops and trees. Zoom-effects shift from the microworld to the macroworld, little animal figures are scattered in a vortex, like the coloured fleks of a kalaidoscope, or skip like series in animation stuck inside a cine-projector. At some moment the film heats up again, the image swells, blisters from the heat and catches fire, giving off a pure light. The inner flame of colors cleanses the soul, there is no dirt and decay in in this zone, it is clean. The eyes of spiritual essences emerge from this flame, wise, calm, but the echo of hot ashes still beat in the heart.
This road can be seen as a metaphor and visualisation of the creative process, the experience of knowing the 'I', that alone can give a sense of genuine freedom from time.


Dr. Artem Magalashvili, art critic.

"Kaleidoscope"
Paper, watercolor, acrylic

"Temporary Hills"
Paper, watercolor, collage
50 x 70

"Souls of puppies"
Paper, watercolor, tempera
Private collection

"Rabbit Lands"
Paper, watercolor, tempera
70 × 50 cm

"House on the hill"
Paper, watercolor
70×50 cm
Private collection

2011. Exhibition space "Turun kristillinen opisto", Turku, Finland

""Берег"
Бумага, акварель
70×50см.

Nexapoda is the scientific name of insects adopted in biology to designate this class of living beings. The appearance of this exhibition in the Nabokov Museum is natural, his love for entomology (the science of insects) is well known. Now, next to the museum collection of butterflies, which Vladimir Nabokov loved to catch with a net and settle in the artistic world of his works, an entomological collection will appear, based on the graphic works of Maria Kviklis, made in watercolor, etching and lithography techniques.

The origin of insects in the work of the young artist is also partly literary in nature. Among the works presented at the exhibition are illustrations for the novel "The Wasp Factory" by Ian Banks. In handling a literary work, the artist is careful, but independent, her works do not become exclusively book illustrations. While remaining faithful to the source, in reading the book she finds answers to personal questions that arise on the paths of her own philosophical and artistic searches. And Maria prefers to search in unexpected places, for example, in the world of insects.

"Summer"
Etching
Limited edition
Private collection

2009. «Nexapoda», V.V. Nabokov House Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

The love of insects is a quality that is not so common among people. They usually cause an instinctive negative reaction. The Latin name Nexapoda expresses one of the most striking features of insects - six-legged. For a human being - a creature with four limbs - the swarming of these paws on a physiological level causes a feeling of otherness. They are Alien, Others. Hence, probably, the usual apprehension when meeting them. Maria treats them with sympathy, bugs and "insects" are her dear friends, she is pleased to understand the complex structure of their legs, shells and antennae, observe their life in nature, study species and subspecies from a biological atlas. However, the insects in her paintings do not look like sketches in scientific catalogs, they live an active and some kind of mystical life. Turning to the world of small creatures, going into the microcosm, Maria uses the zoom-zoom effect, brings the object closer. At the same time, strokes of objects and movements are recorded in engravings, and in watercolors the boundaries of the world are blurred, space turns into allegorical gaps and abysses. Realities turn into color, become transparent and permeable, the combination of spots builds a color universe with red and purple dominants, torn by yellow, blue and green flashes. The color turns into energy, in a field saturated with it, insects are circling, flying, crawling, rustling, buzzing, whose corpuscles seem gigantic.

Insects have the greatest diversity compared to all other animals on the planet, there are about 1 million species of them. Of course, only a part of this huge army can be seen in the paintings of Maria Kviklis. Insects here strictly adhere to the hierarchy. A huge Fly, the Queen of Nexapoda, occupies the throne. The cavaliers of the Wasp, magnificently armed and dressed in a magnificent yellow and black uniform, serve her. This aristocracy of the world of tall grasses takes care of privileged residents - larvae. Nymph princesses (Nabokov associations pop up by themselves) are similar to adults, and juvenile dauphins - worm-like larvae - in order to become like their parents, they need to go through the pupal stage.

The metamorphosis that awaits the larva, in the paintings of Maria Kviklis, turns into a metaphor for the creative understanding of life and into a metaphor for the transformations that a person undergoes in life itself. Insect life is fleeting: a brief century, a bird's beak, autumn cold, some new insecticide. But this is not a problem for them, their nature is subordinated to instincts: to eat, to prolong the birth and not to think about death. But a person sees this situation differently. For him, the feeling of mortality becomes a trauma that everyone solves in their own way: they overcome it, live with it or turn a blind eye to it. The theme of the neighborhood of life and death is vividly highlighted in the artist's work. Insects are one of the ways to actualize it. They are mysterious and incomprehensible, they look like alien aliens, their otherness attracts and scares a little, just as we are both afraid and love to listen to scary fairy tales. A collision with insects brings a person out of the usual state, pulls out the feelings driven into the subconscious.

The artist develops the psychology of the trauma of mortality felt by a person in an installation, the theme of which is inspired by the novel "Wasp Factory" by Ian Banks. The object appears in the center of the exposition, like a candle flame, around which moths are circling. Red wax, insects stuck in a transparent substance, clock faces as a reminder of the inexorability and transience of time. This is an altar, a deadly trap for insects, and a cocoon from which a new life will be born.

Solving the problem and overcoming the universal trauma in the artist's work is realized through love. To every creature. To every little booger. Entomophobia (translated from Greek. - fear of insects) turns into entomophilia (love of insects). The latter term, by the way, is also commonly used as a designation for cross-pollination of plants with the help of insects. So it is better to perceive insects not as inhabitants of other worlds, but as an important element of the erotic life of plants or an amorous allegory. It is no coincidence that the main flight path, according to the title of one of the works presented at the exhibition, is in search of a naked female body

"Baby and Eric"
Watercolor
Paper
70×50 cm.

"Wasp Factory"
Watercolor
Paper
70×50 cm

""The Green Man"
Paper, watercolor
100×70 cm.

"Hayloft"
Etching
Limited edition of 30 copies
Size: 48.4 x 49.7 cm

In the space occupied by the work of Maria Kviklis a rise in the temperature is almost physically palpable. The climate changes, the emotional thermometer goes up the scale, the tension of the meaning and colour field rises. In Maria's pictures material and spirit play in an unreconcilable dialectical contradiction, and the space for their collision becomes a region lying at the intersection of the visual and verbal, depiction and literature.

Moving on to literary sources and taking book illustration to its limits does not lead the artist to 'literariness', which is an abusive term in relation to painting, but reveals a channel for philosophical and artistic investigations. It does not lead directly to the letter and plot of a text, but remains a true, personal reading of a book.

The word becomes something seen, a visual image is born. Maria Kviklis's fifth personal exhibition combines three series of graphic works, created using acrylic, etching and lithographic techniques. Three literary plots acquire a new life, an artistic resolution, colour and flesh. It is precisely flesh since the the living, hot sensation of the body becomes the primary object of analysis.

Exposed through sexual attraction, corporeality appears in drives, providing the name of Elfriede Jelinek's novel Lust. A thick stormy mass of lines convey the smooth suppleness of the woman's body wilting in the intense midday heat.

"Жертвенные столбы"
Бумага, акварель
Размер: 48,6 х 76,8 см

""Берег"
Бумага, акварель
70×50см.

"Остановите на 17"
Бумага, акварель, коллаж
Размер: 55 x 74 см

In these images one can find a reflection of Jelinek's intertextual prose and the resinous eroticism of Egon Shil's pictures. Desire, expressed from the private zone and into the social does not find an adquate correlation between the sexual object and the subject. Vitality becomes its opposite, a heartbeat is turned into a heart attack, and a skyline over Parisian towers becomes the ailing rhythm of a cardiogram.

The central idea of the exhibition and its peak of energy, arose from the artist's reading of and response to Ian Banks's novel The Wasp Factory. The spiritual pain presented there, the warming up of the unconscious libido, the lack of a desire to grow up and a fear of facing the truth. Fiction suffers in the concentrated colour of experience: it explodes in a blinding red, cools in violet, gives off heat in yellow and flows down in sky blue tears.

Blood, death, cruelty, love are an unknowable set, a constant boiling, all mixed-up in an absurd surrealistic cauldron. In Banks's prose this acuteness and burning is balanced by black humour, by a poeticality of language that defamiliarizes, leading to a long series of nightmares and physiological detail.

Maria approaches this task through visual devices, employing practical, optical effects. In one case the object of representation approaches the eye, the borders of horror move beyond the limits of peripheral vision, and it becomes almost abstract, arousing no shock, combining colours and stains.

The brain within which maggots writhe around seems like a red football field or cavern, but a fish skeleton on a plate is an amoeba among other single-cell organisms. In another situation the object emerges into a huge space blazing high in the sky above rooftops and trees. Zoom-effects shift from the microworld to the macroworld, little animal figures are scattered in a vortex, like the coloured fleks of a kalaidoscope, or skip like series in animation stuck inside a cine-projector.

At some moment the film heats up again, the image swells, blisters from the heat and catches fire, giving off a pure light. The slippery body of a girl, dragged along by a kite caught in the instant of its transformation.

In pictures flesh is illusiory, acryllic serves to fix the object in its inner form. The fleshy body and reality itself easily becomes transparent and visible space flickers through the space of the invisible.

The artist sets her own rules and defines the very possibility of vision. The degree of glowing makes the vision hazy: we see everything as if through a heat haze, watering eyes cool in rainbow patterns. But if one were to put one's hand on the brow of the hero of the picture one could get burned. Raging heat engulfs trees, grass, fills the blood, tongues of flame run through the arteries, through the capillaries of the eye and burst in a red ball of fire, a sun or a bomb, in the incinerated head.
Plunging into the psychology of trauma suffered by every personality, the artist sees its source in the traps set by time – the image of the malevolent timepiece, is treated by Maria as the scaffold of time as a collage of numberless clock-faces. Feeling in the moment, we are in no condition to understand ourselves transcendentally.

The third theme is presented in a series of black and white works. The hot flame leaves ashes behind it, the inner flame cleanses the soul, there is no dirt and decay in in this zone, it is clean. The eyes emerge from the dying flame, wise, calm, but the echo of hot ashes still beat in the heart. These faces belong to spiritual essences or angels.

There is still no relief in the fleshy representatives of pre-human civilization, or in the precursors of man that have been released from the shackles of corporeality. They watch from a crumbling wall, cracked from the stone's departed heat, charred and blackened tree bark. The texture conveys a sense of ancient times and mystery. The heat leaves. The fire goes out. The road from the sparks of desire to the wild fire and on to the cleansed ashes is a consecutive series of images assembled in the exhibition that can be seen as a metaphor and visualisation of the creative process, the experience of knowing the 'I', that alone can give a sense of genuine freedom.


Dr. Artyom Magalashvili, art critic

9.12.22-15.01.23 The Beriozka Cultural Center and Gallery will host a large-scale exhibition project "Magic Tent" dedicated to fairy-tale subjects in contemporary art.
The large exhibition hall of the cultural center will turn into a festive tent in which the viewer will be able to immerse himself in the world of modern art, tie a ribbon on a magic tree and make a wish that will surely come true!
The small hall will be filled with works by Soviet artists based on Russian folk and literary fairy tales!
On the eve of the New Year holidays, you want a good miracle so much, and you need to believe in fairies so that they can work miracles, like in the fairy tale about Peter Pan.

Photos from the opening party of the exhibition

"The idea of a magic tent has become unifying. Where can all this be collected? In a magic tent that opens in all directions, in all fairy tales, in all worlds. That is, in principle, in each of the works you can find some recognizable fairy-tale plots," said the curator of the exhibition Artem Magalashvili.