Born Philippines, 1988, lives and works in London
Maria Farrar’s paintings combine art historical and contemporary influences, traversing multicultural styles and art-making processes. Born in the Philippines and raised in Japan, her canvases clearly display the legacy of her formative engagement with calligraphy, which now pushes to the surface through masterful, singularly descriptive brushwork. She analogises her painting process, an instinctive deployment of form to ground, object to negative space, as akin to the apocryphal stories of Michelangelo confronted with blank hunks of virgin marble, that through a process of reduction – a taking away – that forms inherently contained within the medium are revealed. Similarly, Farrar thinks of subjects and painterly gestures that might best evoke them, then follows the path dictated by minimum intervention. Farrar’s conceptual employment of calligraphic expression serves to embody the full nuanced sensations of the richly rendered pictographic details.
straits, Maria Farrar’s first solo exhibition with mother’s tankstation, took place in Dublin in May 2017. Eaves Deep, her second solo exhibition with mother’s tankstation took place in our London gallery in June 2018. Farrar’s work has been included in Day Tripper, a 2019 three-person exhibition at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, Essex and in Known Unknowns the Saatchi Gallery exhibition held in Spring 2018 .Other activities include a solo exhibition with Supplement Gallery, London and residency at the British School at Rome, awarded through the Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship (both 2016). Farrar also received the Melville Nettleship Prize at Slade School of Art, where she graduated with a Masters of Fine Art, Painting; she received her BFA from Ruskin School of Art.