Maria Roza (b. 1998, Baku) is a painter whose work explores the symbolic and primal connections between human consciousness, animality, and nature. She began her formal art education at Ankara Fine Arts High School, graduating in 2016. She studied Painting at Hacettepe University, graduating with high honors, and later completed her Master’s degree at the same institution, focusing her research on hybrid creatures and their representations in contemporary art.

Her first solo exhibition, Hamartia, took place in 2019 in Ankara. In 2020, she received recognition from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s 6th Young Art Project Competition for her work based on the theme Geography is Destiny. In 2022, she joined the Le Maison de Barbara artist residency program and held her second solo exhibition, Parallel Animals, at Istanbul Concept Gallery, which now represents her practice. Her third solo exhibition, Primitive Dialogues (2024), was presented at the Eskişehir Glass Museum and Istanbul Concept Gallery.

Her works have been exhibited at CerModern, Pera Palace, and SALT Beyoğlu, as well as internationally in Beirut and Kyiv. She has also participated in art fairs including Artweeks, ArtAnkara, ArtContact and the Love 360 Festival.

Roza’s paintings unfold around shifting dimensions of identity and the symbolic ties between humans, animals and the living world. Her solitary, introspective figures inhabit liminal and uncanny landscapes where the borders between species, bodies and consciousness become fluid and where human awareness encounters forces older than itself. By contrasting the serenity of nature with the exhaustion of constructed realities, her work evokes a world where tenderness and danger, presence and absence, control and surrender coexist, positioning nature both as a reflective space for self discovery and a quest within the possibilities of existence.