MTH Galeria

Maria Theresia Schwarz-Mach

The artist Maria THeresia Schwarz-Mach – MTH, born 1949 in Graz, began in the mid-1980s to become more and more intensely involved with the fine arts. Close contact with expressionist artists whom MTH met when living in Spain proved to have a lasting influence on her work. In the following years she produced over 500 pictures, most of which are executed in an elaborate oil technique. To the studios in Spain and Bromberg, Lower Austria, was added in 2007 the newly opened MTH-Galeria, situated also in Bromberg. Working stays abroad, study trips, and international exhibitions characterize MTH as a cosmopolitan and active artist.

Art Illuminates the Quotidian

Maria THeresia Schwarz-Mach – MTH, her signature – has for years consistently build her place in contemporary fine arts and constructs her complex multi-faceted visions of the world from her distinctive perspective. Born 1949 in Graz, she initially concentrated on her career, but since the mid-1980s she felt more and more drawn by the exciting possibilities the world of art promised. A vital igniting force were her strong connections with Spanish expressionists, with whom she came into close contact while living in her second home in Spain and whose enthusiasm for art created a lasting impression on her. The years between 1985 and 1995, a time when her life found its base under the bright sun of southern Spain, were to have a shaping impact on the visual language of MTH.

The compelling influence of this warm and sunny region with its intensity of light and its richness of hues, in truth, coloured the pictures of MTH. This can be taken quite literally, since during the years she lived in Spain she not only gained an understanding of the stunningly passionate ways in which emotions are expressed in the pictures of her Spanish colleagues, but she also learned to appreciate the special intensity of colour of the pigments they used. Since that time she has exclusively worked with these materials and has also endeavoured to make these pigments accessible to other artists in Austria.

The visual language of her paintings especially complies with the artistic intentions of MTH. The autonomous dissociated processes the artist wants to evoke in the observer, lend themselves especially for expression in the disputation of colour. One of MTH’s central concerns is the display of the complexity of human relations, which on a symbolical level resembles the exploration of form and colour as well as the intricate layering of hues. She uses colour to stress the intensity of her emotion, to create sensual textures, and to symbolically combine the stream of energy with the actual flowing of liquid colour. Her abstract non-representational compositions, to a large extend preserved in its original shape by a special extremely liquid technique, painting wet on wet, create engaging, carefully structured pigmental excursions which sustain the fine balance between chance and intention. Round feminine outlines, a fluid abstract technique, a positive orientation, and love of light and intensive colour, find expression in pictures which correspond with the personality of the artist, MTH, because they originate from it.

In the opinion of MTH the freedom of art should be made manifest also in the shapes and forms employed by the artist, a position which finds some of its strongest advocates among the “Abstract Expressionists,” with whom MTH shares in many ways. The provocation of individual, self-governed processes experienced by the observer in the encounter with colour is one of the great achievements of abstract art, without which the history of modern art cannot be imagined. In her paintings MTH arranges various influences, personal experiences, and artistic fashions, thus taking on the role of an observer of life who tries to capture the complexity of human existence in her images. Dream sequences, borrowings from natural shapes, fictive landscapes crowd and intertwine themselves on the canvas. Even if, in a conventional way, there are no stories being told, the observer can yet sense numerous latent narrative strands interwoven into dense and complicated pictures. The large œuvre of MTH comprises to date over 500 paintings and countless graphics and drawings, bright, radiant works of art, expressive of joy, created with high-quality pigments from Spain and executed in elaborate oil technique.

The fact that the positive, light, exuberant, vibrant and dynamic elements of life in these works outweigh the dark and gloomy is clearly owing to the personality of the artist, who feels a special affinity to the brighter aspects of existence. With the studios in Spain and in Bromberg, together with the in 2007 newly opened MTH-Galeria in Bromberg, the extended working stays in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, the concrete plans for new international exhibitions, and her still undaunted and indefatigable creative energy, MTH has all the more reason to face the future with optimism and joie de vivre.

Maria Theresia Schwarz-Mach is: