Maria Bjorkdahl is a self-taught Swedish-Moroccan visual artist living and working in Los Angeles.  She works across a wide range of materials and forms, often pushing the materials beyond their intended use by approaching each material without preconceived notions to explore new ways to work with materials, tools and processes. Using materiality and process, she mines ideas of meaning embedded in the material, by either literally taking apart and unraveling the warp and weft of the traditional cotton duck painting support, or stitching old pocket calendar pages onto canvas, or more recently, letting random watercolor marks develop into reflections on entropy.

Although the materials used changes there are recurrent themes that appear across the different bodies of work: presence & absence, concealed & revealed, contemplation, and transience.

A recent series of smaller watercolors on paper loosely centered around the theme of “Rocks” are driven by process. Inviting chance whether in the splatter method reflective of igneous rock solidified into granite from the hardening of magma or lava. Or by taking advantage of the fluid and sweeping nature of watercolor to blend random marks within a delineated area giving rise to rock-like signs mirroring the many layers associated with the formation of sedimentary rock. These work are not memetic. On the contrary, they lack referents – no rocks stood model to these pictures. They are neither landscapes nor still lifes. The primary drive in these works is inviting chance by using a hard to control process in order to provide opportunities for interpretation.

Exhibition history includes solo shows at City of Glendale Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station, Torrance Art Museum Public Art Installation at Torrance Discovery Center and at the Helms Design Center in Culver City. Maria’s work has been shown at group shows throughout Southern California including Artcore, Launch LA, The Museum of Latin American Art and Gallery 825. 

She is a member of Los Angeles Art Association, a grant recipient from the Center for Cultural Innovation, and has attended international art residences in Scotland at the Cromarty Arts Trust, in Germany at the Berlin Art Institute and in Sweden at the “Tomma Rum” (Empty Rooms) residency.

Maria has degrees in International Relations, (MA San Francisco State University) and Anthropology (BA Uppsala University, Sweden).

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For more information please send an email to mariabjorkdahl.artist@gmail.com