Visiting Artist | Maria Gabankova
Maria Gabankova is a Canadian artist who was Augustine College's visiting artist in 1999-2000.
- born in 1951 in Prague, Czech Republic
- immigrated to Canada in 1968
- studied at:
- the Ostrava Art School, Prague
- the University of British Columbia and
- the Vancouver School of Art, graduating in printmaking in 1977
She left Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Soviet invasion. After living in British Columbia, she moved to Toronto where she is a teacher at the Ontario College of Art. She grew up with art because both her parents were artists in Prague, having met at the Academy of Fine Arts there, and they are still painting today, now in Canada.
Feeling a lack of instruction in figurative art, Gabankova apprenticed herself to her parents in the 1970s, while she was studying at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver School of Art, and became absorbed by the figure. Moving to Toronto in 1983, she has returned annually to the Czech Republic since 1989, but realizing how much Prague changed in her absence, she now admits that she can feel truly at home neither there, nor in her adopted country.
In some of her works Maria deals with Christian (see: Benedictus, In a Glass Darkly) and classical themes (see: Melancholia as well as seeks the invisible beneath the visible and the uniqueness of the human personality (see: Pursuit of Happiness). Particularly striking were her parodies of the bureaucrat in paintings of figures constructed from chicken wire and paper (see: The Critic).
* All images (c) Copyright, Maria Gabankova
Benedictus
Melancholia
The Art Critic, 1995
Acrylic, 38 x 26 inches
The Wall, 1997
Acrylic, 10 x 2½ feet
Pursuit of Happiness, 1994
Acrylic and charcoal, 10 x 3½ feet
Absolute Slowdown, 1997
Acrylic, 10 x 4 feet
