Marushka Art:
Starting in 1974, the Michigan-based company "Marüshka" produced ready-to-hang wall art in a bold, simple graphic style that evoked Japanese woodblock prints, Pop Art, and Mid-Century Modern textiles by Alexander Girard, who designed for Herman Miller, and the Helsinki firm Marimekko. At Marüshka, linen or cotton canvas would be silkscreened by hand, stretched, and fitted to a wood frame
The earliest monochrome Marüskha prints, called Field Prints, embraced the back-to-nature movement of the 1970s. There were groves of stark, leafless trees, close-ups of wildflowers and butterflies, and seashells like conches, sand dollars, nautiluses, and clams, all printed in a distinctly ’70s palette of autumnal oranges, muddy browns, mustard yellows, and olive greens that played on the natural and obvious grain of the Polish linen canvas.
In 1980, the Solidarity movement in Poland prevented Marüshka from importing linen for a full year. That’s when the company focused on the multicolored prints of things like hot-air balloons on cotton, before reintroducing more natural linen designs to the line a year later.
Marushka continued with varying success into the 1990s and beyond. As they have, the vintage pieces in particular have become very collectable.