MARIA LEGAT Austria, b. 1980
Maria Legat is a contemporary artist working primarily with large-scale, process-oriented paintings that engage current social events.
She works with her canvas nailed directly on her studio wall and begins with charcoal drawings that bring her themes from abstraction into figuration. Since 2014 she has been working on a series that probes the state of the world, and themes of survival, power relations, justice, hierarchies, coexistence and feminist notions of the self-determination of women and reimagined concepts of motherhood dominate her works. She later mixes her own colors in what she considers an alchemical process and applies paint to the canvases, working often with shades of green and red.
Maria Legat has exhibited at the Künstlerhaus in Graz, the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Kunsthaus Mürz, and the 5020 institution in Salzburg. In 2018, she created a 10-meter long in situ work for the Salzburger Kunstverein. In 2019, the Gemäldegalerie of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna invited her to exhibit a work in juxtaposition with a work of Hieronymus Bosch. She has won awards including from the Society of Friends of the Arts and the Strabag Artaward International recognition prize. Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Carinthia, the Strabag Art Collection, the Starmann Collection, and numerous other public and private collections.
