The painter and object artist Maria Amos was born in 1958 in Russia.
At the age of 16 she moved to Germany together with her family.
As an artist Maria Amos is an autodidact.
She was working in the organisation of exhibitions about famous artists until 2002 , when she started to use her accumulated theoretical knowledge about painting as a means of her own creative expression during a longer stay in Italy.
Her first artworks were exclusively oil paintings.
After she joined the artist group no-made she started to work on three-dimensional objects as well.
Her first glass image was created in 2009 for an exhibition in the Villa Roc Fleuri in Cap-d'Ail.
The works of Maria Amos were on display in numerous solo- and group exhibitions in galleries and communal houses in Italy, France and Germany.

Painting, space, transparence, objects and, eventually, sculpture. Maria Amos’ research is unique although it develops in different media. Her language is totally visual: the images appear to us as if we look at them through the artist’s eyes. The visions of Maria Amos are tragic, not only because her artistic path began several years ago after a tragic happening. The faces and the figures in her paintings are tragic because they speak about reality. Because our society has almost completely lost the sense of rituals, myth and power of tragedy we feel astonished facing the paintings of Maria Amos. After going into her blurry colors we perceive that the real - for Amos as well as for us - is something one can try to catch sometimes, in the wind, in the space, in a gesture. Actually, even the sweetest images present a feature transient and fleeting. It is because dreams, like the life, are transitory.
But how all these suggestions emerge from and through paintings, which are made of colors, matters, action, vision and so on? Amos’ personal language is supported by the study of the masters: Modigliani, post-impressionism, nordic expressionism purified and cleaned by Italians lection on drawing and brightness. But all those references are not so noticeable because Amos’ artworks are totally surrounded by contemporary sensitivity, contemporary tragedy of loneliness, magic realism, sad passions, 3D vision, brightness and lightness, freedom and disappearance... Brilliant faces and disquieting ghosts, seemingly coming out from a Munch painting, have got all the smudges and the acid hues typical of our century.
Even the flowers painted in oil have the clarity of video and dreams. Thanks to the use of pure colors and the masterly combination of them, flowers and plants go out from the still life, becoming poetry of our days. The amazing knowledge of the use of colors (remember that Maria Amos didn’t attend any art school) is never exhibited as virtuosity or a self-referential habit. The construction of the images is realized by the expressive contrast of warm, cold, acids and bright tones in the background as well as in the incarnati. Moreover the artist plays with the ambiguity of sharpness and blur when she takes objects from real life to reconstruct them within the frame of the “painting”. Whether they are the coat of a fox, the bodies of bees, the holy books and the teeths tucked between layers of glasses and words, objects are used by Maria Amos to give the paintings the readiness and the openness necessary to accomplish the contrast with the mystery of life.
Mystery and play are two elements nearly always coexisting in the resarch of Amos. For instance, while the women’s bodies appear closed in a mystery, they seem to face the viewer, looking towards their external world, which is our field. In that willing of communication bodies and faces don’t abdicate to their problematic identities, remembering in that way the tragic cockiness of the women roughly painted by Marlene Dumas.
Sometimes the visions catched by Maria Amos become nightmares, in the monstrosity of deformed bodies which are never antic, rather terribly emotional and tragically real. A sort of muscular painting, halfway between Bacon and Mapplethorpe, exists alongside with sweet gazes and strong psychological insight.
So, while the phenomenal essence of life appears in the withering look of a wild seagull, a reminiscence of urban landscape trascends the space to cross the soul, her loneliness, her freedom and transientness.

Luca Bochicchio