MARIA BATTISTA

MARIA BATTISTA

Hunter-Wolff Gallery is pleased to represent Colorado sculptor and goldsmith Maria Battista. Maria is an accomplished jewelry designer and fabricator, which is one of many of her accomplishments as an artist. Maria works in three divergent technical media: silver and gold smithing, life drawing, and sculpting (Part 1 and Part 2 Sculpting Video), with an emphasis in each of these on the human figure as a central tool of expression. As a jewelry artist, she specializes in custom projects that involve a profound collaboration with the client, and discernment about what may be emerging and seeking expression in consciousness. Often clients have some meaningful object, a gemstone, a family heirloom, and some gold to melt down, etc. from which they would like to create a new image. Her goal is for the final product to be a sort of birthed work, reflecting both the client's intuition and her own, gestated in contemplation and executed through deep listening, design consultation, and finally by Maria's technical and artistic skill. Maria was born in the United States, but has enjoyed extended periods of time in Spain, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, earning B.A and M.A. degrees along the way. She says that although she has not yet visited Asian countries, a certain Eastern spirit seems to exert a strong stylistic influence on her designs, which reflect an affinity for water as a symbolic element, and a distilled Zen-like essentiality. She has studied stone-carving in Italy and in the US, and with Russian master sculptor, Valentin Okorokov. She confesses she has always loved getting her hands dirty but has graduated to the more alpine materials of silver, gold, charcoal and marble. For her, the conception and execution of artistic ideas is spiritual practice, a kind of strategy for understanding. It is her joy to live in the Colorado Rockies and make art out of the substance of mountains. "I love the way images impact our whole self, and the mysterious, intricate ways that images constantly germinate in us, take form, then enlighten and provoke us to further thought and perpetual image-making." 

 

Items displayed at our gallery