Maria Battista

Maria Battista likes to say that she births figures and portraits engaged in wonderment about the nature of reality. She has been sculpting the figure for 25 years. Her studies began at Rutgers University (B.A.) and the University of Kansas (M.A.), and later took her to Tuscany and Umbria, Italy, where she studied stone-carving. She continued advancing her skills for many years with the Russian master sculptor Valentin Okorokov at the Art Students League of Denver. She is now the owner-artisan of First Circle Studios in Colorado Springs, creating bronze figures and portraits, stone sculptures, and precious metalwork. Maria has installed several public sculptures along the Front Range of Colorado and has exhibited in the National Sculpture Society’s awards show at Brookgreen Gardens, the annual Loveland Sculpture in the Park Exhibit, and several fine art galleries. She has also won awards from the Portrait Society of America for her bronze portraits. Maria has 35 years of professional teaching experience and is committed to sharing the knowledge she has received from others. Her works pursue the virtuosity of the Renaissance and 19th-century European masters while tackling contemporary themes concerning the tenderness of the human being and the need for corporeal interrelatedness in the disembodied technological age.