Maria Rivans

Maria Rivans graduated in 3D design from Brighton Art College in 1986. She has exhibited in art fairs across the UK, as well as in New York City and in 2011 she was a finalist in the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition. Maria has a strong collector following and her work is highly sought after.

Maria Rivans’ eye-popping collages explore the idea of existing alternate realities and fantastical other worlds which transport us into a surreal and exciting universe. By appropriating an array of sourced vintage ephemera, Maria seeks to overwhelm us with her compositions by combining vivid and seductive colours with powerful and often humorous imagery.

Best known for her intricate surreal landscapes, pin-up portraits and 3D boxed works, the viewer often experiences a visual and sensory overload from the hundreds of carefully cut-out found elements culled from her huge collection of vintage paraphernalia.

Influenced by the extraordinary colours of Hitchcock films shown in Technicolor and sci-fi TV shows such as Land of the Giants and Planet of the Apes, these heroes from the past have been altered by combining and blending other found imagery scavenged from different eras, thus inviting the viewer into her strange and peculiar world.

Rivans’ collages have a firm running theme of vintage Hollywood films, B Movies and TV trash. The screenplays of vintage films like ‘The Birds, Mildred Pierce and Planet of the Apes’ have been rewritten and reinvented, resulting in newly collaged screen plots which intertwine throughout her body of work, spinning bizarre and dreamlike tales