Maria Horvathova is a visual artist based in Northern Ireland. Born in Slovakia in 1996, she moved to Northern Ireland with her family in 2010 and completed a bachelor's degree of Fine Art Painting in 2019 at Belfast School of Art, where she has been long listed with the RDS Visual Art Award. She went to obtain a Masters degree in Fine Art at the same University, and she received the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts Award at the end of this course in summer 2023.
In her current practice she explores the reminders of landscape, in a romanticised and cherishing approach. She is interested in creating landscape oil paintings that act as an open window into the past and remind the viewer of feelings and memories by capturing the intimate moments of the wilderness. This body of work is inspired by The Kiltonga Wildlife Reservation, Newtownards. This place holds similarities and nostalgic reminders of her childhood garden and environment.
Experimental approach towards painting allows Maria to get a sense of losing herself in the painting. She uses oil paint like watercolour, fluid and fast on the wooden board surfaces. She is interested in re-creating chemical reactions by applying different mediums and thinners with oil paint to create bubble “error” effects, like polaroid photographs would create during the photography chemical development process.
Maria exhibited at Ards Arts Centre, Newtownards along with Anna Horvathova (Maria’ twin sister) last November 2023. She has been mentioned in online publication by Slavka Sverakova on the MFA 2019 cohort group show The Presence of Absence exhibition at the Queen Street Studios in December 2021. Maria has been selected as a Spotlight Artist of this year's Creative Peninsula Programme held by the Ards Arts Centre, where she will be providing a creative painting workshop in August. Some of her early sketchbook works have been donated in the Arts department at Regent House Grammar School in Newtownards.