Marie Pol has studied academic art at the prestigious Imperial Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, followed by years of experimentation and self-education.
A true citizen of the world who has lived across three continents, Marie internalizes all that vast and diverse cultural experience into a unique painterly style. In her oil paintings, she elegantly fuses classical heritage with contemporary visual codes. Her style oscillates between the representation and abstraction, the sensual and the visceral, the illusionism and the textured physicality of the medium.
Marie Pol is influenced by Classical and Neoclassical sculpture as well as by the work of Rothko, Vélasquez and Bouguereau to name a few.
Before becoming a full-time artist in 2018, Marie built a successful career with Deloitte. She holds an MA in French Language and Literature and a BSc in Economics. Marie is fluent in English, French, Russian, Spanish and Italian.
A true citizen of the world who has lived across three continents, Marie internalizes all that vast and diverse cultural experience into a unique painterly style. In her oil paintings, she elegantly fuses classical heritage with contemporary visual codes. Her style oscillates between the representation and abstraction, the sensual and the visceral, the illusionism and the textured physicality of the medium.
Marie Pol is influenced by Classical and Neoclassical sculpture as well as by the work of Rothko, Vélasquez and Bouguereau to name a few.
Before becoming a full-time artist in 2018, Marie built a successful career with Deloitte. She holds an MA in French Language and Literature and a BSc in Economics. Marie is fluent in English, French, Russian, Spanish and Italian.
If not painting, you will probably find her reading, dancing the tango or planning the next mountain adventure.
Marie Pol’s paintings can be found in private collections across Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, India, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States.
Her work is also part of the permanent collection at Copelouzos Family Art Museum, Athens, Greece.
About Marie Pol’s “Back to Antiquity” series
Every human story despite seeming inimitable and unique can be aligned with one of the few fundamental plots (for example, Jorge Luis Borges claimed there were only four fundamental stories: the siege of Troy, the travels of Odysseus, the search for the Golden Fleece, and the sacrifice of a god). These fundamental plots are repeated again and again in national myths, classical literature and - in our lives. The basic plots get coloured with an unrepeatable set of emotions, circumstances, and nuances – making every one of us feel that what happens to us has never happened to anyone else before.
This idea is at the core of Marie Pol’s “Back to Antiquity” series, in which she explores the interplay between the universal and the personal, the abstract and the figurative, the classical and the modern, the external and the internal, the rational and the emotional. By taking classical heritage and infusing it with contemporary visual codes, colour and texture – the artist demonstrates that our stories are deeply rooted in classical antiquity but feel unique, modern and personal because we infuse them with our own mental codes and emotions.
This series is also Marie’s response to the dilemma of what being a contemporary artist means today. Within the same painting, she pays homage to the great figurative artists of the past and embraces the breathtaking discoveries of the Abstract Expressionists, creates masterful illusions of volume and depth and immediately disrupts those illusions.
