Mária Švarbová is the photographer par excellence who has been able to imbue a certain Modernist aesthetic into the art of photography and she has been able to do this in a spirit that has been both intimate as well as glamorous.

In order to achieve such a result, the Slovakian photographer (born in 1988) has drawn on the visual baggage inside which she grew up – symmetries, repetitive elements, deliberately formed perspectives – and she has been able to bestow upon them a dimension that succeeded in immediately fascinating the world of art in which she set out at the start of her career. In just a few words: perfection and utopia.

“My studies in archaeology have given me an interest in materials,” Mária Švarbová claims. “It was starting off from that point that I developed a passion for layers which overlap each other, and which create the world in which we live.”

Her Swimming Pool series is the synthesis of all of this. Her experimentations with space and with materials, in this series on pools, have further been enriched by one single element that has been able to amplify the whole: water.
“My inspiration arose by observing the bare architecture of the swimming pool in my city,” recalls the photographer, “a building that’s already eighty-years old, built inside a sterile space with only white tiles to show for it. And yet, in all of this, I found the presence of water, and the reflections it creates, to be so very captivating. Water is the reflection of people and their souls. I have always been struck by the calm that water confers to each and every environment in which it is present.”

Water and people, people and nature, nature and artificial buildings. Mária Švarbová’s photography moves in, around and through these references, these distractions. Obviously, it is never quite clear where one element finishes and the other begins.

“I strive to attune people to that artificial environment that has been created by none other than themselves,” Mária Švarbová explains. “In my photographs, people become a part of the space around them, and everything turns into one single thing. At times the models in my photos appear all-engrossed, emotionless, but this is a useful way for the spectator to become immersed into the subject and to end up being able to finally listen to his or her own sentiments.”

Binding all of this together is geometry, forms and lines, which respond to mathematical laws even before they respond to aesthetics. “Indeed, it is true. I love Minimalism and the quest for symmetry,” the photographer concludes. “I see timeless characteristics within these elements, elements that almost turn into science fiction. That’s why I like pure lines. I look upon my photography as an artificial document and the swimming pool represents perfectly this artificial document. The architecture of pools fascinates me, and it feels to me that in them I have found a reflection into and onto the other side of the world.”