Maria Justus

Maria Justus (born 1989) lives and works in Munich. She studied painting and graphic arts with Jean Marc Bustamante and fine arts with Julian Rosefeldt at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich (Diploma 2017, MFA 2021). In her work, she combines painting, installation, and digital techniques. She explores how identity, memory, and social reality shift under the influence of media-based visual spaces. This results in precisely placed constellations between physical presence and virtual projection.

Solo exhibitions have taken her to venues including Galerie JJ Heckenhauer, the Munich Art Association, and the Augsburg Art Association; she has realized international projects at institutions such as the Goethe-Institut in Mexico City. In 2025, she received the Augsburg Art Promotion Prize and the Munich Off-Spaces Prize. Since 2021, she has been an artistic associate at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and heads the project space "Gallery Without a Name."

Photo credit portraits: Julia Milberger

Photo credit: Works Production Pitz

Maria Justus

Q&A with the artists:

The exhibition ARTIFICIAL? Traces of the Present brings together works that question our perception. Reality appears not as a given, but as something that is constantly being appropriated. ARTIFICIAL? questions whether what we see and experience is not always already made, constructed, and mediated.

1.) How does your work engage with reality and its construction, and what “traces of the present” become visible in it?

My work does not understand reality as a given, stable entity, but rather as a constructed framework of memory, historical narratives, and media representation. The starting point is often fragments from the past, as well as personal experiences and impressions—images, architectural elements, or moments of rupture—which I extract from their original context and reassemble. Through superimpositions, shifts, and fragmentations, it becomes clear that every representation is an invitation to spaces of interpretation.

2.) How does your work develop from the initial idea to completion, and what role does your presentation style play in this process?

My work emerges from research. It begins with a moment of upheaval (social, political, architectural, personal, poetic…) that triggers a process of thought. I gather material, examine contexts, and develop an open space for reflection in which motifs and formal decisions gradually coalesce. I shift relationships, reinterpret symbols, and allow different temporal planes to intertwine. The work process is not linear but rather characterized by condensation, revision, and deliberately introduced breaks.