- born in 1951 in Prague, Czech Republic
- immigrated to Canada in 1968
- studied at the Ostrava Art School, Prague, the University
of British Columbia and the Vancouver School of Art, graduating in printmaking in 1977
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Maria Gabankova grew up with art because both her parents
were artists in Prague, having met at the Academy of Fine Arts there, and they are still
painting in Canada today. Feeling a lack of instruction in figurative art, Gabankova
apprenticed herself to her parents in the 1970s, while she was studying at the University
of British Columbia and the Vancouver School of Art, and became absorbed by the figure.
Moving to Toronto in 1983, she has returned annually to the Czech Republic since 1989, but
realizing how much Prague changed in her absence, she now admits that she can feel truly
at home neither there, nor in her adopted country. In many of her pieces she seems to be
working through this sense of displacement. In Kafka’s Prague (1988) she
expresses her despair "that the Kafkaesque system would never leave Czechoslovakia
and that the political oppression would never end" (1998). In Magic Lantern
(1990) she portrays anxiety at the coming change brought by revolution, and in the series Spacial
Displacement (1995) she has painted what she describes as "the absurdities and
grotesquenesss of bureaucratic structures" (1998), using wire and paper to create
caricatures of bureaucrats. Her works in the 1990s, such as Threat (1994), Forgotten
News (1995), and New World Order (1995), include sculptural figures that are
wrapped to resemble mummies, and drawings of draped figures, or figures implied by folds
of drapery alone, where the body itself is missing. As Gabankova has suggested, the
presence of the soul comes through in the absence of the flesh. The draping,
mummification-like process, and absence of bodies all echo the artist’s own feeling
of loss upon leaving her native Czechoslovakia. "A lot of that central European stuff
is so deep in me," she says. "It’s about the pain of separation, and I keep
looking for ways to explore it or recreate it. For me, art is both very physical and very
spiritual" (1995). Gabankova has illustrated books, magazines and album covers,
painted commissioned portraits, and is now a teacher at the Ontario College of Art in
Toronto.
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