MARÍA KOROL
AZUL, AZUL, AZUL
May 9–25, 2024
María Korol is a visual artist whose practice is rooted in drawing and painting. She is interested in storytelling, literature in conversation with history, memory, and transformation. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1980, in the middle of a military dictatorship, Korol was exiled to Brazil for five years and later returned to grow up in her home country. She moved to the United States in 2004. Korol has shown her work nationally and internationally, in places such as March Gallery and The Painting Center in New York City, September Gallery in Kinderhook, NY, Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, among other places. Her artwork is in numerous collections and she is a distinguished fellow of the Junge Akademie der Künste, the Hambidge Center, and the Women's Art Institute. Korol was a finalist for the Artadia Award in 2022, the recipient of the 2020 Edge Award with the Forward Arts Foundation, and was selected for The Creatives Project and a Hughley Fellowship. Her work has been mentioned in The New York Times, ARTFORUM, ART PAPERS, Burnaway, and ArtsATL. Her studio is based in Atlanta, where she is an assistant professor of art at Morehouse College. María Korol is represented by Marcia Wood Gallery.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work starts with an interest in history, literature, and archival information from Latin America but quickly explodes into fully imagined and speculative images, where freedom and possibility distort and transfigure reality. I place marginal, eccentric characters center stage and empower them. My drawings, paintings, and clay sculptures develop through pareidolia, seeing and revealing fantastical critters by moving and pushing material around, finding unexpected forms and tensions, and fleshing them out. Their personalities and interactions surprise me as they surface. Distinct animal attributes entertain and confront our imagination. Anthropomorphism brings them closer to us. I resist assumptions based on outer appearances and I see that they are often incorrect. I engage in slow observation and in close listening and an entirely different reality materializes. I listen to the music animals make in the landscape, not as background noise, but as the central rhythm of our lives. Their strange and beautiful bodies are our own: hopefully, they are moved to dance, and so are we.