Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Maria Rivans

Maria Rivans is a contemporary British artist known for her scrapbook-style collage artwork.A mash-up of Surrealism meets Pop-Art, Rivans’ work re-appropriates vintage collectables to create dreamy realms which transport the viewer into fantastical worlds of the imaginary, each one suffused with vivid color, arresting imagery, and intricate detail.Rivans’ collages have a firm running theme of vintage Hollywood films, B-movies and old television shows. Her process begins with her extensive collection of vintage papers which she scavenges from antique books and retro magazines.She is always on the look-out for that perfect ‘something’ in second-hand shops and at market stalls.Like piecing together an unruly jigsaw puzzle, Rivans begins to collate and assemble the skillfully cut-out fragments and scraps, laboring over long periods and making alteration after alteration, until the collage begins to take shape.Through an intense attention to detail and an artistic sensitivity to color and composition, each of Rivans’ artworks is the product of months of careful deliberations and decisions.Her collages are fun, inventive, and full of familiar faces and extensions. The collage pieces that stand in for the hairdos of movie stars of the past create a harmony and connection between today and yesterday.