New Heroes & Pioneers

Maria Svarbova offers a breath of fresh air in the photography world. She has a distinctive style that departs from traditional portraiture and focuses on experimentation with space, color, and atmosphere, which places itself neither in the past nor in the future. FUTURO RETRO is a transcendental and timeless series of images from the artist which evokes a traditional setting with sci-fi elements and follows from the immense success of her first photography book, Swimming Pool. Maria has a wonderfully individual style which moves away from the conventional. The socialist era and its architecture, public spaces and colour are hugely inspirational and this has been admired across the world in solo exhibitions and press on a global scale.

This is Maria Svarbova first book due to popular demand from her largest and continuing series Swimming Pool. Sparked by a hunt for interesting location in Slovakia, her fascination with the space of public swimming pools contributed to developing her visual style. Sterile, geometric beauty of old pools, usually built in the Socialist Era, set the tone for these photographs. There is almost a theatrical quality to the highly controlled sceneries that Maria captures. The figures are mid-movement, but there is no joyful playfulness to them. Frozen in the composition, the swimmers are as smooth and cold as the pools tiles. The colours softly vibrate in a dream-like atmosphere. Despite the retro setting, the pictures somehow evoke a futuristic feeling as well, as if they were taken somewhere completely alien.