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Maria Calandra - Artists - Fredericks & Freiser

Maria Calandra’s painting overpowers modern apathy and digitized disconnection through saturated and hypnotic form. As humanity becomes increasingly distanced from the organic world and sequestered in cities or behind screens, Calandra’s landscapes defy this status quo. And while existential concerns like the climate crisis and a modern “loneliness epidemic” loom large, the artist returns to the roots of the landscape genre to restore faith in a sublime connection between individual and the environment. Vivid, experiential, and embodied, her liquid inversions not only reconnect the viewer to the landscape but also reconnect the landscape to itself. Calandra’s works recommit to landscape painting as a method of activating a sense of transcendence in the viewer. Through vibrant color and psychadelic details, each work is suggestive of a unique atmosphere that the artist has experienced in person—whether that be the mountains in the south of France, the swamps of Florida, the Grand Canyon, or the California coast. Calandra’s paintings fit into a lineage of landscape as an expansive and sometimes paradoxical space where immediacy and memory intertwine. With no defined boundaries, these works liberate themselves and the viewer from rigidity and mediation, offering a radiant sense of potential energy.