Iceland

For years, Maria Kiesner has consistently explored modernist structures as well as peripheral and utilitarian architecture in her work. Her painting balances on the boundary between realism and abstraction, softening the literalness of representation in favour of atmosphere: calm, harmony, and a subtly present sense of abandonment that permeates the depicted spaces. Kiesner’s paintings emerge as the result of selecting and arranging remembered impressions: from many possible views of a single place, one remains—shaped by memory or personal experience.

The series devoted to Icelandic architecture is the artist’s personal account of her journey. She was particularly struck by the coexistence of architecture and nature—its wildness, unpredictability, and power. Traces of sudden events, such as volcanic eruptions that forced inhabitants to leave their homes overnight, left behind deserted buildings standing on black, solidified lava fields and raw volcanic wastelands. The artist also retained in her memory the extraordinary atmosphere of the Icelandic landscape—its mystery, melancholy, and almost cinematic aura of light and vegetation. Recalling the words of Stefan Paruch, the artist’s travel companion: “(...) Maria Kiesner set out on a journey. She observed a landscape that has already entered the collective imagination of tourists from around the world. Those who have seen it were stunned; for those who have not, it is a source of longing for something spectacular. The painter filtered the experience of being on a distant Atlantic island through her own practice.”

The architecture presented in the works harmonizes with nature, not competing with it but blending into an atmosphere of silence, slowness, and melancholy. The paintings also feature the phenomenon of stratospheric clouds—known as nacreous or mother-of-pearl clouds—rare and ephemeral, rendered in a subtle, diffused manner that enhances the sense of suspension and unreality. Soft tonal transitions, a restrained colour palette, and simplified forms make the structures hover between presence and disappearance, not dominating the space but attempting to settle within it, as if negotiating their existence with the surroundings. Architecture is therefore not a subject in itself but becomes a tool for telling a story about the memory of place and the fragility of human presence in the face of nature’s forces. The paintings from the Iceland series reveal a moment of suspension—a state of quiet equilibrium in which space, light, and form coexist, creating a contemplative, hushed image of the island.