
Exhibition preview·London
Storms, Spirals and DNA: Maria Kreyn Fills a London Church With Dream Logic
Maria Kreyn's Dream Logic, staged by the M.O.N. Art Foundation at the Swiss Church in Covent Garden for Frieze Week, runs through October 19 with storm paintings and a DNA-helix altarpiece.
At the Swiss Church in Covent Garden, painter Maria Kreyn has turned a historic place of worship into an immersive world of storms, spirals and glowing skies. The exhibition, Dream Logic, is timed to Frieze Week, organised by the M.O.N. Art Foundation, and runs through Monday, October 19. It brings together a new group of paintings in which swirling, light-filled tempests are cut through by sharp geometric forms, and treats the church's own architecture as an active partner rather than a neutral backdrop. The building itself has layers: first raised in 1855 in a Palladian style, it was later updated with a mirrored screen by architects Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein. Kreyn plays off that mix of old and new. The centrepiece is the monumental 2026 canvas The Alchemist's Coil, installed at the altar where a religious focal point would normally stand. In it, a golden spiral staircase doubles as a DNA helix, winding upward through a luminous landscape that suggests an alien inferno. The work draws loosely on assembly theory, a scientific framework that links the origins of life to ideas about complexity and memory held in matter. Kreyn works in a lineage that runs from J.M.W. Turner through the Surrealists. Like Turner, she treats nature as powerful and overwhelming, but she adds a mathematical, otherworldly layer, as if a hidden structure sits beneath atmospheric chaos. Her stated touchstones for this show include Leonora Carrington and David Lynch, artists who gave shape to the logic of dreams through association and intuition rather than cause and effect. Dream Logic is Kreyn's third major presentation inside a sacred space, all produced by the M.O.N. Art Foundation under curator and gallerist Maria Vega, who founded its parent gallery, Ministry of Nomads, in 2008. In 2024, her Chronos filled St. George's Anglican Church during the Venice Biennale, and last autumn Hyperobject brought storm paintings to London's Fitzrovia Chapel. Vega has described her aim as moving contemporary art beyond the conventional gallery, pairing artists with culturally rich, unconventional rooms where art, science and belief can meet.


