Joseph Maruska, an internationally recognized artist, is a native Californian of Czechoslovakian and Hispanic decent. Born and raised in East Los Angels, Maruska studied painting at the University of Southern California and has had exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Strasbourg and Belgium. His paintings are in private collections as far as Thailand, Russia, Dubai, China and Vietnam.

         His unique style of abstraction is based on a lingering intimacy with two of the major concerns of representation: light & shadow and positive & negative. The stylization of gestures which characterizes Asian brushwork of centuries ago enables Maruska’s technique to retain its representational essence, informing the images with a reduced lexicon of signifiers; clarifying the essential role of each line and passage of which remains.

        Maruska’s staccato punctuation marks and large color Welds take this devolution into essentials even farther - limiting the implication’s narrative clues to emotional and psychological ones. There is life, death, sex, despair and poetry in Maruska’s work. and this ups the ante on pure abstraction. These psychological landscapes host mysteries of their own, hinting at the remembrances, romance and fantasy. But these shifting glimpses are themselves points of entry into the nebulous world of joy and pain inside the mind, inside the hidden places where we dwell in dreams.