One to Watch - artist Maria Kreyn: 'We're wired for enchantment'

Maria Kreyn’s exhibition, Dream Logic, was one of the highlights of London Art Week. Taking place at the 19th Century Swiss Church in Covent Garden, it was the perfect setting for Kreyn’s visionary paintings which combine Turner-style exterior landscapes with surrealist internal landscapes. A perfect storm, you might say, and for this New York painter, the inspiration was in fact one of culture’s most famous storm-based behemoth.“They were inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” says Kreyn, taking the Standard around the work, “And the question I had for myself was what happens when you take out the figure? Can I with painting rewrite all of the beauty and wonder and intensity of human experience without necessarily pointing towards the figure literally?”“But the way it all came about was a project for Andrew Lloyd Webber at the Drury Lane Theatre not far from here.” Indeed, these works on permanent display in the theatre are probably where Londoners will recognise Kreyn’s work, and certainly the style that they kicked off. Previously she was doing more traditional, figurative work but Webber changed all that. “He sent me an email, and I deleted it because I thought it was spam,” she says, “Then we actually spoke and he was excited. He’d seen my work in Vanity Fair and called to say he was refurbishing this theatre in London and he needed me to make 8 paintings for it. The prompt was Shakespeare and he said, ‘I want you to make this dangerous and apocalyptic, with your soul on fire.’ It was beautiful and I thought he really saw me.”This set her off on an artistic journey over the past 5 years trying to capture “emotional energy in a way that feels musical.” Indeed it is music that is the key influence for Kreyn, and not Webber’s. She shows one spectacular painting inspired by Rachmaninoff, “the Preludes that I loved growing up. I’m genuinely in dialogue with the music, in this flow state. Painting takes me there very quickly. I think humans are made for that, right? For creative expression. The poetic recombing of information.”She was born in Russia but grew up across the States – Florida, Philadelphia, Texas - and studied maths and philosophy at university in Chicago, but dropped out to start painting in earnest. Her parents were creative, and her mother was a piano player; Kreyn’s key memory is of doodling underneath the piano while her mum practised: “Being in love with that music and being obsessed with Old Master paintings.”Marian Kreyn - Dream LogicPress handoutShe says Rembrandt and Caravaggio were her heroes, along with Turner; “In his work I find the surfaces so magical and profound. The ways he uses paint is so sculptural, and the turbulence of it aligns with the turbulence of his seascapes.” But for all the influences, what she really wants is, “to feel alive when I’m painting, and I want people to feel alive when they look at these paintings.”That said, for all the obvious emotional power here, there are mathematical and scientific references, geometric shapes appearing in the tumult. She shows me The Alchemist’s Coil (2026) where a DNA strand becomes a stairway to heaven. Another called Chronos shows an egg-shape forming above the sea, reflecting Kreyn’s deep interest in mythology. “We did a show at Venice Biennale called Chronos, but the idea was that that it isn’t the father of time, it predates that and goes back to the Orphic Egg idea, where the universe is created through the confluence of sea and sky, and birthed out of this egg. Everything is metaphors on the origin of life.”And this is partly why Kreyn’s work is so thrilling. It’s not just the ability to render the Romantic sublime with a Dali-esque edge but her ambition to engage with the Big Questions. There’s no half measures here. Kreyn’s is an extreme sports fan on the side, and the combination of adrenaline-seeking and connection to nature is a great indicator for her work, where the experience of being with them is like jumping off an emotional mountain. “The experience of the weather outside of us is a beautiful metaphor for everything happening inside,” she says, “It’s this idea of reaffirming that we are an extension of the planet. Especially when our reasoning is being outsourced to AI and the mechanisation of our world, we should think about what it means to be humans relating to the planet, and how we are an outgrowth of it, but also have a fragile connection.”With all these metaphysics going on, it’s small wonder that the Swiss Church and places around the world like it, have become important venues for her shows. Read More“I just find it exciting, the idea of taking a reverent space and transforming it into an emotional experience rather than a dogmatic one. Because that’s what we’re all yearning for, right? A resonance that we feel when we see something that produces awe in us. I love the idea of amplifying that…”“We’re wired for enchantment,” she says, “I have this desire to feel alive, and have a soul contract with the universe to make paintings, to do my part. I hope people have a good time with my work.