The joyful Tuscan views of Maro Gorky

Maro Gorky is a child of art: her earliest memories are of her father, Arshile Gorky, who taught her how to draw, cut out shapes in coloured paper and sharpen pencils in order to observe and preserve the spiral curls that fell. The Armenian painter, considered the father of abstract expressionism, committed suicide when his daughter was five years old.

Maro kept his memory and followed in his footsteps, but found her own personal and unique path in art and life. A path that, after a childhood and youth between Europe and the United States, led her to choose Italy. Since 1968, she has lived in Tuscany, in the countryside outside Florence, and the landscape has been and remains the great inexhaustible source of inspiration for her paintings.

'The Thread of Colour' is the title of the exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London, which presents a selection of works from 1980 to 2025: two large paintings, 'Spring Vineyards' and 'Autumn Vineyards', were painted this year especially for the exhibition. The common thread running through decades of work is colour, rich, brilliant and dense with meaning.

Gorky's landscapes are abstract, but are immediately recognisable as Tuscany: the vineyards, the cypresses, the rolling hills, Saturnia and its ancient volcano, the castle of Tornano. Simplified to the essential, just lines, shapes and colours.

Gorky painted the landscapes that can be seen from every window of her home and the nature she observed in her daily walks, always generous and different in the changing seasons. She has created her own alphabet of forms as 'containers where I put the emotions I feel when I paint'.