Maria Szakats b. 1984, Romania

As a child, Szakats spent a formative year with her grandmother in Hungarian Romania, separated from her parents who had relocated to Austria as political refugees. Her grandmother’s home was lined with insulating, embroidered textiles, their floral patterns covering every wall. This immersive visual environment, at once comforting and claustrophobic, shaped her aesthetic sensibility, becoming a motif that has followed her throughout her life. This recurrence was intensified by a revelatory experience in her twenties, when a hallucinogenic trip in a flower-wallpapered apartment in Vienna brought these images back with unsettling force. As she lay on a couch, the ceiling seemed to lift, revealing an apocalyptic, fast-moving sky, while the floral patterns surrounding her pulsed with motion. This vision—of beauty dissolving into unease, of a world teetering between familiarity and disorientation—resonates throughout the artist's body of work.

Maria Szakats (b. Romania, 1984; lives and works in Paris) holds an MFA from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. She has had solo exhibitions with Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy, Brooke Bennington in London, Galerie Chloe Salgado in Paris, Tusk in Chicago, among others.