Pink Sanctum: Swimming Lines
In the series Pink Sanctums: Swimming Lines Maria Svarbova revisits her iconic Swimming Pool universe through the lens of Luis Barragan’s architecture in Mexico City. Photographed at Cuadra San Cristóbal, this chapter marks a decisive shift in Svarbova’s palette: the introduction of an intense, vivid pink that transforms the pool into a sanctuary of color and silence.

For Barragan, pink was not ornament but devotion, a chromatic force that reshaped space and perception. Svarbova embraces this principle, weaving her characteristic stillness into Barragan’s monumental walls and reflective waters. Figures in white swimsuits and red caps appear frozen, yet in this series there is a new, subtle dynamism. Their bodies suggest more movement than before, a restrained choreography that hints at flow within the stillness.

The atmosphere recalls her earlier socialist-era pools, yet here the tone is altered, reverential, almost liturgical. The pool no longer functions merely as a site of leisure, but as a stage where color becomes sacred and silence performs its own choreography.

While future chapters of Pink Sanctum will expand to include horses and clerical figures, Swimming Lines remains focused on water and architecture, on the purity of form distilled through the dialogue between body, wall, and reflection.

Pink Sanctum: Swimming Lines is both homage and transformation, a meditation on how space can sanctify the everyday, and how pink, in its most luminous intensity, becomes a threshold into deep reflection.