Mary Hrbacek
 
 
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Artist Statement

I want to jar people’s expectations that trees are “the other,” because they’re not. Like us they are living beings on this earth, who need air and water to sustain their lives. I want to paint the trees to look so human that people will grieve when a tree dies as much as they would grieve for a friend.  When I moved back from Sweden, I lost everything I loved and I never got it back. I grew up in a family that gave no support; they never even spoke to me. I was bullied and harassed, not accepted, but my love of art has been the refuge that sustains my life.

 

Mary Hrbacek - Queen Connected
Mary Hrbacek, Observant, acrylic, gesso on canvas, 4 x 6,' 2019                        Mary Hrbacek, Enclosed Torso, acrylic on linen, 24 x 36," 2018

Mary Hrbacek - Daylight Savings
Mary Hrbacek, Daylight Savings, acrylic on canvas, 6 x 8,' 2021

The trees I have painted and drawn while working outdoors in Riverside Park, NYC have revealed an elusive human presence that is not realistic but evocative in the subtle similarities that link tree-forms and people. At first I became attracted by the textural patterns and peeling bark of the sycamore trees, but in time, possibly because I was also drawing from the live model, my vision changed. The figure (especially female) and tree limbs fused in my psyche transforming them into a hybrid structure. Since then, I have been inspired by the symbols of transformation in Roman poet Ovid’s work, The Metamorphosis, that has sustained my efforts to convey awareness of the human interconnection with nature to the public through my art.

..."here is an emphasis on the female body as an icon, and by extension, a surrogate for women’s collective experience. Allegory is inherent in Hrbacek’s approach, a kind of extended metaphor, in which a psychological drama is performed at a symbolic remove. A case of possession strongly comes to mind: a human captured by a tree or turning into one, like Daphne in Greek mythology, becoming a laurel tree to escape the god Apollo’s lustful pursuit. As a source of the Daphne image, Hrbacek cites Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the Roman poet’s mock-epic of love and transformation. The self, capable of concealing and dramatizing its mutable identity, is central to these paintings. Hrbacek’s Light Search is prime example of this tendency to create from the natural a theater of the self, making a character out of a tree, with hand-like branches extending beyond the frame."

John Mendelsohn



" Ms. Hrbacek has put together an important array of acrylic paintings…the emphasis on subtle yet discernible anatomy and the emergence of ambiguous images with echoes of human bits. In her hybrid tree creations Hrbacek fuses male and female traits, which stretch the boundaries of conventional thought about nature, to forge images imbued with a mysterious aura of optimism that encourages viewer engagement and conjecture on the fantasy realm that extends beyond ordinary experience."

Walter Idlewild