Maya Bloch

Selected solo exhibitions: Fate May at Times Seem Abstract, Jerusalem Artists House (2023); Sleeping Women, Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv (2020);  Anybody Out There, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2017) ; Life goes on without me, Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin (2016); Feels like Home, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2015); Here You Are, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2013); This is Not Happening, Sommer Contemporary Gallery, Tel Aviv (2012); Hello Stranger, Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York (2011); Fabricated Life, SanGallo Art Station Gallery, Firenze (2010); Anna Veronica, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa (2009)

Selected group exhibitions: More than One, the national 8th Drawing Biennale, the Print Workshop, Jerusalem (2022); Of Foxes & Ghosts, Mamoth Gallery, London (2022); Shadows, The Stable, S-chaf, Switzerland (2022); Pareidolia, Parterre, Tel Aviv (2021); Table Manners, The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv (2018); You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, 68 Projects, Berlin (2015); Rothfeld Collection, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington (2013);  Dorian Gray, Second Guest Gallery, New York (2012); Facial Expressionism: Immanence Envisaged, Cerritos College Art Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); Solar Eclipse, Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv (2011); Shesh-Besh, Petach-Tikva Museum of Art, Petach Tikva (2011); Traces -  the 4th Drawing Biennial, Jerusalem Artists' House (2010); Girls Just Want to Have Funds, PPOW Gallery, New York (2010); Batsheva's Studio, Marlborough Gallery, New York (2010); Connected Unconscious, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), New York (2009)

Maya Bloch paints predominantly monochrome figure paintings using graphite, gesso and color pencil on canvas. Her work represents haunting and melting dream-like scenes, that seem to play out on and at the peripheries of family gatherings long since passed. Bloch artistic style is led by the urge to "ruin" the characters she paints. Basing her paintings on her immense collection of old family photos (not hers) she believes that by trying to paint something from reality and translating it "wrongly" it breeds another reality, the reality of painting. She is drawn into the photographs’ unusual happening and spiritual moments frozen in time, translating them into a painting while discovering things that could not have existed in the photos and that can only be born in the painting. She tends to "erase" the humanity from her subject matters as their parts bleed in and out of recognition, answering the need to minimize her own presence in creating the works, melting inside and disappearing.

The state of being unclear with herself is what keeps her going and painting the next painting.

Full CV (pdf) / Maya Bloch ; Maya Bloch website ; Fate May at Times Seem Abstract - text by Drorit Gur Arie