Maria Kozak is a painter and new media artist living and working in upstate New York and Warsaw, Poland. Her family emigrated to the US in 1983 at the height of martial law and she grew up navigating the two cultures. Her drawings and paintings are intuitive expressions of her inner world based loosely on society, nature and the sublime. They are about the absurdity of being a human, the dark comedy and the parts of the unconscious mind that we normally try to hide or ignore. There is always a duality present in the process whether it's a battle between darkness and light, control and surrender, stillness and movement, or the real and artificial. Her virtual work is about the tension between repetition and change as we renegotiate what it means to be human in the digital age; as the boundaries between ourselves and others are constantly being redrawn. She is always seeking levity and connection.
Her work is found in collections nationally and abroad. She has been mentioned in Artsy, the Wall Street Journal, Cool Hunting and Paper magazine. She has shown most recently at LETO Gallery in Warsaw, Dreamsong in Minneapolis and The Detroit Public Library. She was awarded a NYFA /NYSCA Grant and a Schusterman Foundation Fellowship for her work in emerging technology. She has a Master’s degree in painting from the New York Academy of Art and is an alumni of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art + technology. She is also currently the Editor-at-large of Przekrój, Poland’s oldest culture magazine.
