Maria Calandra
Maria Calandra
Middle Summer's Spring (UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens), 2026
Acrylic on linen
45 x 60 inches
Maria Calandra’s paintings begin with specific places (coastal paths, gardens, mountain ranges), often planted or cultivated by others, but are built in the studio from memory rather than direct observation. Referencing sites across Maine, Northern California, and Brooklyn, what emerges is not a fixed view, but a reconstruction of experience: fragments of landscape are compressed, scaled, and reorganized into a continuous field where foreground and distance no longer hold.
In these works, sky, water, and vegetation do not sit in separate zones but circulate across the surface. A horizon may appear, but it fails to stabilize the space; depth is suggested, then dissolved. The viewer is pulled into a place that feels navigable yet refuses a stable vantage point.
Calandra’s handling of paint reinforces this instability. Her surfaces appear dense and saturated, but are built through thin, fluid applications that allow color to pool, spread, and merge. This produces a tension between weight and liquidity. The movement of the brush feels continuous rather than fixed, built through repetition and rhythm rather than isolated gesture. Forms gather and hold, even as they threaten to slip apart. Color operates structurally rather than descriptively, organizing the image while simultaneously undoing it.
Pleasure is central to these paintings. Their color, movement, and abundance draw the viewer in, but not passively. What first reads as lush and immersive gradually reveals itself to resist orientation, as the eye moves continuously without settling and no single element holds.
Calandra approaches landscape not as a site to be described, but as something internalized and reconfigured. The result is a form of landscape painting less concerned with representation than with constructing perception itself.
Maria Calandra (b. 1976, London. Lives and works in Brooklyn) holds an MFA from Cornell. She has had solo shows at Half Gallery, Los Angeles, Marta Gynp, Berlin and Antwerp. This will be her second solo exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser.