ArtistSwedish
Maria Manuela Vintilescu
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Maria Manuela Vintilescu was born in Stockholm in 1959, and her first vivid encounter with art came at the age of seven when she stood before Niki de Saint-Phalle's large-scale sculpture "She" at Moderna Museet. That early impression - of a work that was both monumental and playfully subversive - left a lasting mark on the direction her own practice would eventually take.
Before turning to fine art, Vintilescu spent ten years working as a scene painter in the theatre, a background that gave her a particular understanding of surface, scale, and the relationship between image and viewer. She came to her own art later than many of her contemporaries, and the work she made when she did arrive at it was fully formed in its preoccupations. Her Pop Icons appeared for the first time in 1998, and from the outset they occupied the territory between high art and popular culture, between East and West.
The subject matter that defines her work grows from a personal and familial connection to Japan. Her great-aunt Sigrid spent the first half of the twentieth century in Japan, and her father, Jan Vintilescu, published the first Swedish translation of haiku poetry in 1959 - the year of his daughter's birth. This inheritance shaped her sensibility. She draws on classical Japanese woodcuts and their imagery of elaborately coiffured women in patterned kimonos, but her figures inhabit a contemporary world: young Japanese women in miniskirts, moving through cherry blossom and haiku text, occupying a space where tradition and pop culture meet without friction.
Her technical approach is rooted in silkscreen and serigraphy. The prints are produced in signed, numbered editions and achieve a surface quality that suggests both the mechanical reproduction of pop art and the refined flat planes of ukiyo-e. Her "Flower Year" suite - twelve female portraits paired with haiku verses interpreted by her father - was exhibited at Liljevalchs' Spring Show in Stockholm in 2000, a significant public debut that brought her work to a wide audience. Since then it has been shown at galleries and art fairs across Europe, as well as in Tokyo, where the cross-cultural conversation her work stages is most directly in dialogue with its source material. She is represented by Galleri GKM in Malmö and Stockholm, one of Sweden's oldest contemporary galleries, and by Galleri Mats Bergman.
At auction, Vintilescu's work has appeared regularly at Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla and Bukowskis Stockholm, with Göteborgs Auktionsverk also handling her prints. Works include silkscreens such as "Harajuku Girls 2 (Ni)", "Akane", "Naname", "Summer Breeze", and portraits including "Kvinna vid skärmvägg" and "Kvinna i kimono". Editions of up to 190 have been recorded. Prices at Swedish houses have reached 1,102 SEK for individual prints, with a lot of two portraits in lithograph selling for 500 EUR at Bukowskis.