Born in Czechoslovakia, I learned to live in absurdity. Growing up in the historically, and culturally rich core of Prague, with its mysterious genius loci combined with the everyday stifling atmosphere that I experienced, taught me to be an independent thinker. Since my early age, I was very sensitive to my surroundings which was full of contradictions. This opened in me surrealistic feelings and perception of the absurd. The tension between what is and what should be, between fiction and disclosure, dreams and reality, has become the essence of my interest, which I projected into my images. My vivid imagination was my escape, and paper and pencil my world.
Theater, stage, and costume design works, significantly influenced my mindset. Underlying visual stimulus was in the script, situations closed between the lines, often unexpressed, hidden in the text of the play. The white paper, changed now to the "Black Hole" - theater stage, which gave me the opportunity in a magic way, to create visually the situations and time, deeply attached in the text. While theater, which is limited in time, and with each ending production performances, the magic of created stage design disappears, while my paintings allow me to embrace an emotional moment and preserve it forever.
Another great influence on my work, was my collaboration with contemporary and classical composers and their music, a period where I worked closely with The Society of Norwegian Composers. Since graphic design for its precision, clarity of compositional challenge, I was inclined since my youth, the period I worked with concert and theater posters, LP albums / DC covers, were very happy and rewarding period for me.
Perhaps because of that, most of my paintings, regardless of size, are still in the square format. Music, as one of the highest creative elements, introduced me to its healing power and its ability to unleash the beauty that lies within. Visually expressing the music, gave me the most satisfaction.
Another element of influence on my paintings in great extend, was without a doubt, my life in Norway. In this Nordic country, where colors are sharper, shadows far longer, mountains far higher, fjords far deeper, and the importance of human beings compared to the surrounding nature, has a far more realistic relationship.
These experiences and influences, including living in different cultures with different values, have become a part of my expression in all forms of my visual art.
"Intense, powerful, and unique are the words that best describe both Madla the person, as well as her works. Her Eastern European background, endless world travels, and incredible sense for beauty, are the ingredients that make her work so appealing to the eye."
Diana Suttle"Here is the grand adventure of an impassioned heart, enthralled with the awe and mystery of life, luring one to penetrate deeper into the mind, to grow into one's imagination, into the poetics of light and dark, line and space, the real and surreal. Madla Hruza resist pedantry in her paintings in favor of what is profoundly sensual and endearing in nature and human nature. She is showing us through her refreshingly seductive images that it is safe to trust again in the heart, of walking in at the center of our beings, to view all emotions with the awe of discovery, each through the old, enduring truth we call art."
James Ragan"Hruza’s work is versatile, presenting the subject in question in a spectrum ranging from a naturalistic to a stylized approach, always possessing a poetic quality, even when in a dramatic vein. She has a sensitive, precise style, often bordering on the surrealistic."
Norwegian Artist Lexicon"The artist Madla Hruza builds an entire shadow imagery and light from the observation of daily relations with their presence and also with its absence. In her work is evident the existence of a bridge between the symbolic and fantasy. Viewers’ perceptions are permeated by mysterious memories of a nostalgic past. When metamorphose the imaginary, the artist reveals a second level of reality whose existence is only perceived by their complicity. "
José Roberto Moreira