Anna-Maria Škroba

Yve Yang is pleased to present Anna-Maria Škroba’s second solo exhibition in New York, I’m Raining Before the Rain. In this new body of work, Anna-Maria Škroba revisits drawings and photographs, translating them into paintings through a process that privileges intuition over exact replication. Rather than tracing or reproducing images with precision, each canvas becomes an act of rediscovery, remaining faithful to the original composition while allowing room for transformation, ambiguity, and imagination.

This approach shifts the focus from representation to perception. As figures emerge on the canvas, the spaces surrounding them simultaneously materialize and dissolve, creating environments that resist fixed definition. The paintings often center on solitary figures, yet these scenes extend beyond narrative. They suggest an elusive presence, something that cannot be fully named but is undeniably felt. If drawing and photography capture a moment, painting extends it, allowing its atmosphere to unfold over time rather than remain fixed within an instant.

Occupying a state between certainty and openness, the works inhabit the subtle territory of the threshold: neither fully here nor entirely elsewhere. The threshold is less a destination than a direction, a vector of movement, possibility, and becoming. At the heart of the exhibition is an exploration of the relationship between the individual and the space they inhabit. Movement, both physical and psychological, depends upon this relationship. Even when a figure is posed, Škroba approaches the subject as a person inhabiting a particular situation rather than as an anatomical form.

Rather than offering definitive narratives, the exhibition allows the atmosphere of each painting to continue unfolding, where stillness itself becomes a form of movement.

Anna-Maria Škroba (b. 1990, Riga, Latvia) is a painter who often renders her subjects through silhouettes, blurred faces, and abstraction, treating portraiture as a means of evoking presence rather than documenting identity. Her restrained backgrounds become active fields where figure, color, and space subtly interact, while delicate applications of paint, varied fabric textures, slender supports, and occasionally irregular edges create atmospheric works that communicate what resists language, conveying the emotional presence of her subjects through a quiet visual language.

Škroba studied photography at Jānis Rozentāls Art High School in Riga before relocating to Germany, where she completed her Meisterschüler diploma under the guidance of Peter Doig at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2018. She lives and works in Düsseldorf. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Yve Yang Gallery, New York; Linzbach, Düsseldorf; and Careva Contemporary Gallery, Riga. Selected group exhibitions include By Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou; The Institution of Automation, Kyiv, Ukraine; The White Ermine, Galerie Wandtarchive, and The Pool in Düsseldorf; and Display Gallery, London, among others. Škroba’s work is held in the Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou and The Cloud Collection, Nanjing.