Maria Anto, STILL NATURE WITH BLACK ROCK, 1986

100,0 x 81,0cm - oil, canvas

sign. p.d.: Maria Anto

On the reverse signed l.g.: Maria Anto 1986, below: 887 [in circle]; on g. stretcher bar: MARIA ANTO "M.N. WITH BLACK ROCK." 100 X 81.



In her deeply symbolic paintings, Maria Anto often turned to the genre of still life. In it, she departed far from traditional depictions of objects, situating the depicted arrangements in a hybrid, surreal space - at the intersection of interior and open landscape (see, among others, Still Life for an Angel, 1983, 94 x 124 cm - offered at the Agra-Art auction on December 8, 2024; Still Life with a Blanket, 1996, 80 x 120 cm). This overarching concept also organizes the composition of "our" painting, divided into two distinct zones. The harsh seaside landscape is bordered here by a table covered with a striped tablecloth, on which - like a multi-faceted theatrical decoration - props straight from the living room of the old Warsaw intelligentsia pile up, most likely inspired by the decor of the painter's Żoliborz home. The viewer is admitted into a mysterious, deformed world, where perspective is distorted, proportions are disrupted and objects are scaled up. Its individual elements - from cloudy skies, sea and rocks, to tins, books and glazed tankards - encode specific meanings, conveying the truth about the painter's inner life with similar power to words in poetry, a field equally close to her. As noted by art critic Magdalena Ujma, this was not a juggling of symbols - the artist created from them a tool that allowed her to convey intimate content without the possibility of reading (M. Ujma, New and charming world [in:] Maria Anto. Painter, Zachęta 2017, p. 49). Still Life with a Black Rock, presented in the catalog, is a depiction of a reverent, metaphorical setting, which is an excellent example of Maria Anto's work that escapes stylistic assignments.



♣ A fee will be added to the auctioned price in addition to other costs, based on the right of the artist and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Law of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite).

Maria Anto (alias Czarnecka-Antoszkiewicz, Warsaw, December 15, 1936 - Warsaw 2007) studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under Stefan Płużanski and Michal Bylina. She received her diploma in 1960 and participated in the Sao Paulo Art Biennale in 1963. She regularly exhibited in the country. She quickly developed her own painting style, poetics and mood, which distinguish her paintings from her contemporaries. The limp, ethereal figures in her paintings, close to the work of primitives, are in unreal landscapes and interiors, far from the rules of perspective, but close to the logic of daydreams. The fairy-tale, dreamlike aura of the scenes she paints is also emphasized by dark colors, sometimes brightened by violent streaks of light. During martial law, Maria Anto participated in independent artistic life. She exhibited her works at church and private exhibitions (including the cyclical "Encounters with Art" at the Divine Mercy parish on Żytnia Street in Warsaw). Later she returned to her typical poetics, somewhat akin to naive painting.