Maria Torp Watching Darkness, 2020

The potential of painting
We see images everywhere. We see the world in images, and we are inundated by a constant flow of visual impressions. Many people try to get away from our hectic, image-saturated world into art museums, dreaming of finding artworks that offer experiences of intimacy and authenticity. We scout around and look for something that will ‘move us’. What can painting do that other images that surround us do not offer?
A painting is created by a person with a purpose. The purpose may be a matter of craftsmanship – a wish to transform paint on canvas into visual expression. Some painters may have a story they want to convey or a time on which they want to comment. Paintings differ.
A simple painting may have a simple purpose – for example to be in nice colours and without surprises each new time you see it. A good work of art has multiple purposes, for example combining craftsmanship, colour, line, brushwork, narrative, references and the times in a masterly unity. Works like this may be immediately accessible, but they may also be complicated to take in. The central thing is that they involve more than we see directly, and offer us more each time we make the effort to receive it. The work has an agenda.
The agenda of the work is what the painting wants of us as viewers. The work is not something we must penetrate and decode. It comes to us and unfolds for us if we give ourselves time and the painting our attention.

Maria Torp’s works contain this kind of multiple layering. At first glance you can directly read off the fact that this is a figurative painting.
We often see a person or figure in an immediately recognizable situation. But when we look more closely, there will be surprises. With craftsmanlike precision Maria Torp combines her figurations with surrealistic elements, a visual presence and intense energy. The subjects seem immediately recognizable and picture-perfect, but as we let the work open up and affect our senses, we can feel as viewers the satisfaction of appreciating the craftsmanship, the dance of line and colours, the intensity, the narrative potential of the
motifs and the sense of current relevance that the works reflect. Figurative painting has aroused new interest and status in recent years, and Maria Torp is one of the painters who are helping to renew and develop the field.
Karen Grøn, Museum Director, Trapholt, Denmark

Immaculate, Engaged, Vibrant Images of the Times
The visual artist Maria Torp paints intense, compelling portraits and impressions of space. With a variety of drawing and painting techniques she unveils vital, hyperrealistic images of human beings in various relations and situations. There is a distinctive depth and sensitivity in Torp’s precise portraits, and her paintings remain vibrant and alive in expression – indeed, they almost quiver with life.

Torp works with sculpture, painting and on paper. Maria Torp’s visual idiom is flawlessly precise and reproduces complex surface structures such as hair, skin, clothing and textiles in a hyperrealistic way. Similar in style to photorealism, the surfaces in Torp’s works are smooth and glossy as the pages of a fashion magazine; but Torp’s works extend beyond the photorealistic; her working process with the paintings involves not just the reproduction of a photograph, but a personal or intimate story – Torp’s approach rather has roots in the nineteenth-century art movement Realism, which is characterized by the consistent observance of the requirement to deal with the contemporary scene, often combined with a so- cially critical focus on the human condition.

Unlike Naturalism, which means a striving towards the objective rendering of visual impressions, the Realist representation always has a certain element of attitude-influenced interpretation – a striving to emphasize those very features that are considered particularly indicative of the true underlying reality.
Julie Thaning Mikines Curator and Art historian