**Sofia Hallström explores how Maria Kreyn merges science and spirituality in her new show at Fitzrovia Chapel. **

Maria Kreyn, 2025. Photos by Frank Martinez

The gilded mosaics of the Italian Gothic interiors of the Fitzrovia Chapel render a serene space of reverence, and it is challenging to consider how a contemporary painting might inhabit its gold-leaf walls. Brooklyn-based artist Maria Kreyn’s paintings often occupy ecclesiastical settings, and within this context her paintings seem to inherit the chapel’s atmosphere of reverence. “We are pre-primed for reverence in a church, but many of us are also skeptical of it,” she explains, “I love working in and with these spaces—its a collaboration, and it’s also a benevolent coup. To ride the emotional wave of a religious feeling without any of its prescriptive doctrine seems like a beautiful way to open the aperture to the collective spiritual, away from the specificity of a story.”

Installation view: Maria Kreyn, HYPEROBJECT, 2025. Courtesy the artist and MON Art Foundation. Photo by Philip Vile

In Hyperobject, a monumental canvas titled Solaris commands the nave of the chapel. The vast seascape is set at sunrise, depicting waves breaking, their surfaces glinting under early morning light. Circular forms fracture the crashing waves, resembling binocular lenses or viewing devices, as though the work itself were engaged in observation. Here, introspection turns outward. Time, too, becomes elastic: Solaris is a frozen storm, a temporal paradox in which, as Kreyn notes, “elements that shouldn’t be suspended are.”

In another painting titled Ocean Prism I, cones of light funnel shards of luminosity onto a restless sea, in what Kreyn describes as “the meeting of control and surrender.” The title suggests refraction, the dispersal of light into spectral multiplicity, and by extension, the transformation of perception itself. The viewer’s gaze is drawn toward the apse, where another large canvas is mounted beneath the dome. Its composition evokes the experience of looking upward into a sky of fractured clouds, reframed within the strict geometry of a rectangular canvas. The recurring oval motif is central to Kreyn’s artistic vocabulary, and functions as a centrifugal force, spiralling the eye and extending the illusion of ascent. The painting’s scale and luminosity engage with the chapel’s architecture, yet its density of gesture and sheer saturation verges on excess.

Maria Kreyn, 2025. Photos by Frank Martinez

Before becoming a painter, Kreyn studied science and mathematics: “Coming from a stem background, I have a deep respect for science, for inquiry, and for scientific method. These paintings are visual puzzles and games exploring our understanding of ideas at the edges of our objective inquiry, where our intuitions and our data still feel mysterious.” To think about these paintings in relation to science, deepens her artistic inquiry. The work calls to mind Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s reflections on time and perception, and the physicality of Kreyn’s artistic process resonates closely with Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics, wherein “reality is not made of things, but of interactions”, as concluded in his book Helgoland (2021). Kreyn paintings enact this principle visually: their existence depends on the chapel’s light, the viewer’s movement, and the subtle interplay between material surface and surrounding space. In this sense, her work is not static; it exists in relation to the artist’s body, the viewer’s gaze, the material’s response. The act of looking itself becomes part of the work’s ontology.

Installation view: Maria Kreyn, HYPEROBJECT, 2025. Courtesy the artist and MON Art Foundation. Photo by Philip Vile

The exhibition’s title, borrowed from Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘hyperobject’ extends this relational framework. As Kreyn explains, “The hyperobject in this context is also a mysterious object — omnipresent, but not fully seen at once. It’s durable, yet beyond the edge of our intuition and knowledge. We get only tiny pinholes into limited facets of its nature at any given moment. Take the idea of Deep Time. Attempting to think and intuit beyond the anthropocentric conditioning we inherit in human culture is an attempt to think beyond what we can think. Painting has the capacity to push us into that inquiry.” Her paintings likewise offer only glimpses: fragments of weather, folded time, and spatial distortion that resist total comprehension. “Our calculations often fall short,” she admits, “in understanding dynamical systems like weather… or perhaps even neuronal patterns and consciousness.”

Rose Flare, 2024. Oil on canvas. 60 x 80 in. 152 x 203 cm. Courtesy of the artist and MON Art Foundation.

Kreyn locates beauty in incompleteness: “There’s a reason we gravitate towards the mountains, and waterfalls, and also towards religion,” she explains. “We are moved by the mystery; we’re moved by what pulls us into the seemingly infinite, and we’re also confronted by the contrast of scale — of our self as we meet that mountain or that infinity, or conversely, at times, our self as we suddenly feel timeless and continuous with the infinite, like a mediative state of non-dual awareness. Awe seems like a feeling built into the nature of being human. We are wired for enchantment. And my aim is to reach that feeling.” The recurring lensed forms in her paintings evoke not only optical distortion but the warping of perception itself. Paint dissolves into turbulence only to be drawn back into compositional order; geometry stabilises chaos, and gesture interrupts symmetry. It is, as she concludes, “the place where our desire to understand ourselves as reasoning beings meets the incalculability of a dynamical system.”

Within the chapel’s shifting light, Hyperobject aspires to make time perceptible and to invite the viewer to feel it, as Rovelli proposes, not as a linear flow but as a “network of events.” Kreyn’s paintings gesture toward this ambition with conviction, grazing the infinite rather than depicting it. Yet the encounter remains somewhat overdetermined: the scale, density, and intensity of the paintings risk overwhelming their own conceptual subtlety. What emerges is a meditation on the physics that, while visually commanding, does not always resolve its philosophical aspirations into genuine transcendence. The result is an exhibition that gestures powerfully toward the sublime but, perhaps inevitably, never quite escapes the gravity of its own material and metaphorical weight.