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Maya Bloch
Painter
born 1978
Graduate of MA in History of Art, Tel-Aviv University, 2004
Lives and works in Tel-Aviv, Israel
In the passage between the anonymous and the intimate, between photograph and painting, Bloch seems to peel away the figures' layers of "normality," inherent to the photographs' mundane veneer. The figures themselves undergo a kind of "wearing out" or effacing procedure, rendering them tormented and distorted; their bodies - usually asexual in nature - are often severed from their faces and blurred like ghosts'. A great gloom permeates the works, and the figures' faces show signs of distress. The narrative source of this malaise is generally not revealed through the images themselves, remaining a kind of general mood of sadness and loneliness - a feeling which grows even more palpable in the collective scenes which supposedly symbolize the sociality of a circle of friends or the family. An atmosphere of tension, anxiety and suffocation permeates these scenes, in which the figures seem self-absorbed, sharing no interrelations or communication. The figures' communication difficulties and their troubled silence are well visible in the depiction of their mouths, most of which are closed, effaced or hidden. Their stifled silence, which harbors complex psychic mechanisms, present the figures distorted with the force of that repression. But despite the general air of gloom, the works also exhibit a light touch of black humor. The artist's gaze exposes her subjects in all their vulnerability, but simultaneously reflects identification, and above all compassion.
Forthcoming: Maya Bloch solo exhibition at Thierry Goldberg Projects in NY in June 2010
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