Maria Toumazou

Hot Wheels London presents Fire, Master, Daylight, Maria Toumazou's second solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first in London.

Railway Museum in the mountains, I gather the tree clippings along the way. The last one, closest one, in the very village of the museum, was hanging between plastic water tubes, from the first floor of a broken down building. The ground floor used to be a grocery shop, I tried to use a metal stick meant for dragging plastic produce baskets, but I wasn’t tall enough to reach. The windows upstairs were wide open, the windows of the house across were wide open. A street lived by immigrants working on the fields lower down. This branch was the most limb-like of all, a fig tree, pink to grey. A man from the house across, with his crying baby comes to help out. We get it down and into my car and I continue down the hill for the obsolete train station— now railway museum. The station master was never from the empire, but rather a cypriot, and this very one was in the newspaper as a child for halting the train in its tracks for fun.

In the 50s, the train track was dismantled and carried backwards on its own body, to the port. The excess steam from the engine dripped along while in motion, causing greenery to spurn around the arid land; red, silver, blue.

Maria Toumazou (b. 1989, Nicosia, Cyprus) is an artist based in Nicosia. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Light industry at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2025), developed through the International Studio Scholarship; Half Frame at Overbeck-Gesellschaft – Kunstverein Lübeck (2025); and Rhythm, Citizen at Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2022). She has participated in group presentations at the Benaki Museum, Athens, organized by the New Museum and the Deste Foundation (2025); Parthenon 11/Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (2025); the 15th Baltic Triennial at CAC, Vilnius (2025); Phenomenon 5, Anafi (2024); the Biennale für Freiburg 2, Freiburg (2023); the Nicosia Municipal Art Center (NiMAC), Nicosia (2019); and Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia (2018). In 2017, she took part in the Cyprus Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale as a guest within the artist collective Neoterismoi Toumazou. She is currently part of the IASPIS Residency Programme in Stockholm.