Maria Szakats is an Austrian designer and visual artist who works primarily with textile installation. She has an MFA from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and is living and working in Paris. Her decade-long experience as a designer in the fashion industry has led her to question the notion of value in terms of production time and utilisation. In her artistic process, the appreciation of manual work is paramount, with the aim to create a tension between craft and material.
Maria Szakats challenges our biased projections of employing and assigning mediums and materials according to preconceived binary gender divisions. Wholeheartedly assuming the household feminist artistic aesthetics, she sincerely rejoices in using a so-called feminine medium, assuming ancestral skills of textile fabrication. The result is often eerie and dreamlike, oscillating between harshly contrasting materials, for example metal mesh curtains and fur-like mohair tapestries. Her work has been shown in Paris, and she is currently preparing her first solo show in Vienna, Austria.