Maria Nordin

The flow of watercolour is Maria Nordin’s true element. She began painting when she was 22, first in oils and acrylic, but changed to the medium of watercolour. Her preference is for large format images, flowing colours and clearly applied colours. Her best known works are intimate depictions of human beings with vividly pink skin tones. The backgrounds are reduced. The bodies she presents seem as if cast into empty space and captured in mid-movement. Her series Pink Noise consists of facial portraits that are so harshly trimmed that it is almost impossible to tell if they represent men or women. In Nordin’s pictures there is both fragility and firmness, precision and freedom. The delightful and the disagreeable share equal status in a distinctive idiom that strives to steer away from the sickly sweet towards the strange and weird.