Maria Kontis

Maria Kontis was born in Canberra in 1969 and currently lives and works in Melbourne. She has held solo exhibitions in Australia and Europe for over a decade and is regularly included in group exhibitions in Australia and internationally.

She works exclusively in pastel on paper, creating finely detailed drawings of fragments and memories like old photographs, crumpled pages and images from souvenir pamphlets. They take the viewer beyond the object and beyond the image into notions of vision and temporality.

After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW in 1999, Kontis undertook an MA in Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. In 2003 Kontis was awarded The Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, and in 2002 the Paris Residency, Cité Internationale des Artes, awarded by the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. In 2016 she undertook a Residential Fellowship at the Cross-Cultural Centre Ascona (Centro Incontri Umani Ascona) in Switzerland.

More recently she held a solo exhibition, Oh life is mad and frenetic… but do look after yourself, after undertaking the Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence at The Friends Gallery, Tweed Regional Gallery, Murwillumbah, NSW.

Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW, UBS Art Collection, Switzerland and the University of the Arts London, United Kingdom.