Anna-Maria Škroba

About

Škroba’s solo exhibition primarily focuses on portraits, diverging from traditional portraiture by depicting figures through silhouettes, blurred faces, and abstraction. For Škroba, a portrait is more than a mere representation; it is a conjuring of a visual language, akin to a direct recording of one’s presence.

Her sparingly treated background, though seemingly void, is imbued with the state of ‘muteness’—devoid of clear physicality yet a lucid manifestation of figure, color, and space. The spatiality in her painting, coupled with intense or pale shades, intricately sets the atmosphere and aura of each figure. Škroba achieves such nuanced expression via the delicate application of paint, exploration of diverse fabric textures, slender frames, and, on occasion, the incorporation of broken edges. Through the portrayal of muteness, Škroba conveys sentiments that cannot be expressed in words, breathing life into them on the canvas.