Maria Farrar’s contemporary approach to portraiture is heavily influenced by her upbringing in Asia and its traditions celebrating the art of calligraphy. The result is a poetic practice in which single sweeps of the artist’s brush delineate the graceful and elegant figures that populate her work. Included in the Saatchi Gallery’s exhibition Known Unknowns in 2018, Baguette beautifully captures the joys of a Parisian spring with a series of succinct brushstrokes that appear to glide across the surface of the painting. When speaking of her work, Farrar says her subjects seem to evolve as her brush moves. She says she imagines her subject matter and the painterly gestures which might best evoke them, and her figures emerge from her brush with minimal intervention. Born in the Philippines, she now lives and works in London. Her work was included in the recent group exhibition Xenia: Crossroads in Portrait Painting at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, earlier this year.