Maria Bjorkdahl is a Swedish-Moroccan visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Her work focuses on notions of unearthing multiple layers and buried memories. Using materiality and process, she mines ideas of hidden meanings by either literally taking apart and unraveling the warp and weft of the traditional cotton duck painting support, or more recently, in a more metaphorical sense in paintings of abstract weaves of color.

Maria makes paintings out of manipulated cotton duck, by cutting and unraveling the threads that hold the canvas together and then re-assembles the material into biomorphic shapes that are painted with oil and/or acrylic. 

With her most recent body of work: Stripes of Color, she is returning to a more traditional painterly expression by keeping the canvas undisturbed; i.e. not cutting or unraveling the threads as in previous work. The emphasis in the new work is on paring down the work to a minimum of marks while letting the marks reflect the interconnectedness of the warp and weft of a woven piece of fabric. Ideas of family history, ancestry, mixed heritage and genetics influence the work mirroring Maria’s own mixed heritage as a Swedish/Moroccan person. 

Much of her work is concerned with straddling the line between abstract work taking on referential meaning often of a transcendental nature versus staying firmly in the non-representational field. Is it possible to create non-representational work while retaining the mark of the hand expressed through a lyrical abstraction aesthetics, or will that form, by necessity, imbue the painting with transcendental meaning, even if unintended by the artist. 

Maria’s work has been shown 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 and a grant recipient from the Center for Cultural Innovation and has attended artist residencies in Ljusne, Sweden “Tomma Rum” (Empty Rooms); in Stockholm at a self directed residency at Slipvillan; and at the Berlin Art Institute in Germany.

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