Artists: Maria Kreyn - Joseph Mallord William Turner

Robilant+Voena presents Maria Kreyn. Continuum, the first solo exhibition of works by American artist Maria Kreyn in Milan. A selection of her new paintings are presented alongside an important Swiss watercolour by J.M.W. Turner, creating a dialogue between Kreyn’s atmospheric renderings that merge figuration with abstract geometries, and the visionary approach to landscape as embodied by the English Romantic painter. Through this exhibition, Robilant+Voena aims to create a discourse across the centuries that reflects the gallery’s commitment to transhistorical curating, positing new works by a rising talent in the contemporary art world alongside a work by one of the great landscapists of art history. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated digital catalogue, with an essay by former rector of the University of Bologna, Professor Ivano Dionigi.

The exhibition focuses on Kreyn’s seascape paintings, which draw from a wide range of references spanning art history and contemporary culture, reinterpreted through a personal and immediately recognisable painterly language. Informed by her training in maths and philosophy, which she studied at the University of Chicago, and her interests in topics such as neuroscience and mythology, the paintings arecharacterised by expressive tempestuous vistas that combine representational landscapes with geometric abstraction. Impassioned seas tussle and blend with heavy skies, often overlaid with ovoid, parabolic or linear markings, like the ghost of a golden ratio diagram or the blueprint of a Renaissance design.

Kreyn’s sweeping paintings, shown alongside J.M.W. Turner’s watercolour The Splügen Pass, executed around 1842–43 and described by John Ruskin as ‘the best Swiss landscape yet painted by man’, offer a reflection upon the sublime quality of the landscape and how such vistas contain the power to connect people across time.

The artist explains:

‘The Splügen Pass is often depicted as a Sublime Pass of dramatic, dangerous beauty. In Turner’s delicate watercolor, we see a city looking towards a portal, into an expansive gateway between the mountains. I can imagine how travelers traversed this same radiant passageway over many centuries, all passing through the wild Alpine nature, which opens to the warm Italian landscape on the other side.

The works in this exhibition are filled with visualizations of portals, geometries, and eggs, all for me symbols of entering new realities and channeling greater source. Hence the title Continuum—evoking constant regeneration, rebirth, repetition, and a continued dialog with history—knowing that so many human minds before us have viewed the same natural expanses and shared, over time, a similar sublime emotion.’

Together with Turner’s historic Alpine landscape, Kreyn’s paintings offer a moment to connect with questions that have inspired artists across time and geographies: what is our relationship with the landscape, and how does it make us feel?