Ministry of Nomads Foundation is pleased to present Chronos, a solo presentation featuring the
work of Maria Kreyn. Organized by Maria Vega and MoN Foundation, this collateral event of the 60th
international art exhibition at the Venice Biennale is staged in St. George’s Anglican Church and includes 10 monumental new oil paintings. The exhibition opens Monday, April 15th, and will continue through June 22, 2024, with an opening reception on Tuesday, April 16 from 5 - 10 pm.
Chronos welcomes viewers into an immersive meditation on the materiality of time, the turbulent flow of weather, and our essential, fragile human connection with the atmosphere. Maria Kreyn’s landscapes present luminous vortexes in which flat planes of prismatic geometry intersect painterly, atmospheric space. These angular structures lens the canvas, as though folding time-space to coalesce in a central ovoid shape.
Invoking the Orphic mythology of the cosmic egg, the haptic energy of Kreyn’s paintings highlights the natural cycle of creation, dissolution, and regeneration. In the Orphic story, the unaging Chronos — the embodiment of Time itself — produces Aether, Chaos, and an Egg. This cosmic egg, emerging from the union of Hydros (the primordial sea) and Ouranos (sky), engenders the source of creation and life. Kreyn links the Orphic egg with embryogenesis—the explosive yet delicate unfolding of life and mind from a foundational state.
Reprising the Romantic tradition, which celebrates the sublime power of nature, Kreyn’s storm paintings are portals into philosophic dreamscapes that are at once playful and foreboding. Bound between abstraction and representation, chaos and calculation, they capture a sense of collective anxiety in the face of extreme weather and climate change — a dazzling vision of a terrifying threat.