Maria Torp lives and works in Copenhagen, Danmark. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007 and has previously studied at the London College of Printing. She has exhibited her work in several Danish art galleries, art museums and art institutions and has made commissioned work for corporations such as FTF, TrygVesta, Ferring and lately at the Velux Foundation. Furthermore Maria Torp is cofounder of the artist trio MAM, along with the artists Anika Lori and Mette Geisler.
Maria Torp, born 197, masters the superrealistic genre, which has been a continuous feature in her work. Her paintings are pure dynamic precision and yet they offer a sensibility characteristic also to the artist’s sculptures and drawings. Maria Torp’s art invites us to rediscover the well known and inspires curiosity towards the unknown. She works with her patterns in an open dialogue creating narrations with minor details or formal expressions turning our comprehension upside-down. Throughout her early carrier, drawing established the foundation of her work. More recently it has become an important inspiration as a form of expression itself but also as a model for her paintings and sculptures.
The artist translates the drawings into pictures, which she translates again into painting – a process that integrates and resolves the weight of the superrealistic style of painting and makes the experimental features more visible. Working with ink and paper allows Torp to work with an intuitive and spontaneous approach. This result in a large quantity of drawings, that in action, mood or gesture refers to a person’s character, story or situation. Subsequently, she stages the selected individuals and photographs them, then replicates their portraits in her self-interpretive paintings. With such simple narrative techniques, intuition and free play, Maria Torp converts the portrayed individuals into general characters in a mixture of realism, drawing, abstraction and expressionism.
