Biography
Maya Gelfman, (b. 1978), is a multidisciplinary artist focusing on “site-and-time-specific” processes.
Graduated from Shenkar School of Art & Design, BA, 2006.
Main mediums are painting, performance, installation and street-art.
She is a nomad, currently residing in France and the U.S.A.
Exhibition Highlights:
Gelfman has exhibited eleven solo exhibitions. She's currently exhibiting paintings at the 60th Venice Biennial, Italy.
Previous solo exhibitions include the National Gallery in Bangkok, Thailand in 2015 and at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, USA. Previous group exhibitions include the Israel National Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Haifa Museum of Art, and art fairs in London, Miami, and Washington D.C
Residencies & collections:
She has participated in six artist residencies, including at the Swatch Art Peace in Shanghai, China, Roza Center for Interdisciplinary Art in Poland, and the Windgate Residency at KSU University, USA. She was a finalist for the Halcyon
House fellowship in 2019. Her works have been purchased by private and public collectors, including Lettenmayer & partners,
Rivka Saker, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Creative Discovery Museum, Historic Building 98, Milu Hotel.
Media and Publications:
Her work has been featured in films and on TV, in print and online, and she has been published in four international art books,
(in London, Germany, france, Colombia and USA).
In 2013, she gave a TEDx talk about her unique approach to art making.
Street Art:
In 2009 she co-founded 'Mind the Heart!', a street art project that has since reached over 100 cities on 5 continents.
Between 2017-2021, she created a 365/24/7 performance in public, spanning 100,000 KM (60,000 miles),
across 48 States in the U.S.A. To learn more about the journey: “The Serendipity Experiment”.
Artist statement
I’m a multidisciplinary artist focusing on “site-and-time-specific” processes.
My main mediums are painting, performance, installation and street-art.
My works are “snapshots” of a certain place, at a moment in time, and myself situated there and then.
Indoor or outdoor, in each medium and in every context, I deploy somatic tools to engage directly with my surroundings
and allow sensory input to inform artistic decisions. While the works stand on their own, articulating a specific experience,
put together they speak to something larger, a framework, a mindset.
This way of working entails a few key components:
- Deliberate Spontaneity
- Movement
- The Body: integrating thinking with sensing
- The Unknown: creating liminal spaces
- Intentionality: being aware of change
I arrive on location without preconceived ideas. Rather than imposing my expectations, I let the work reveal itself over time.
By entering a state of 'not knowing', I can open up, observe, take in, and then respond to whatever arises.
The body is an integral part of the process, serving as a conduit of raw experience and expression.
Art making happens not only with my hands and eyes, but also with my ears, skin, gut, breath.
Large canvases are laid on the studio floor as I "dance" on top, leaving colorful traces that mark movement through space.
Brush strokes are synchronized with breathing, sounds emanating from the window navigate my hands, colors and textures
are determined by the landscape, the time of day or night, the season. When I work in public spaces,
the body enters the realm of the work to become another element of the architecture.
Flow and change are significant in initiating and enabling my practice, both artistically and beyond.
I've also been practicing mindfulness for over twenty years, but the fascination with the immediate and the visceral started many years before. As a child, I lived through a near-death experience during an open-heart surgery.
That event, and the healing period that followed, shaped not only my worldview but the very way I work today.
The urgency with which I create is fueled by an embodied understanding of impermanence.
Having teetered on the threshold between life and death at a young age compelled me to explore dichotomies inherent in existence. The clash between internal and external realities, fragility and resilience, beauty and decay. When transformed into the creative process, these seemingly contradictory notions can form symbiotic relationships, allowing for agency, balance and release to occur. My vision is grounded in Symbiosis, in the possibility of a whole that includes the broken parts.
Moreover, one that can only be made whole by this inclusion.
We perceive life as a current of stimulants. Ceaseless information, internal and external, is registered through the senses,
and the brain organizes all that into thoughts and actions. Whatever is deemed relevant or important is formed into a coherent story while the rest is stored away in our subconscious.
To paraphrase, we form and re-form an understanding of reality and ourselves in it, again and again, with every passing moment. This suggests a possibility of re-examining the stories we tell ourselves and others. In the words of Viktor E. Frankl: "between the stimulus and the response there's a space, and in that space lies our freedom and our power."
My story, and the need to find new ways to interpret it, informed two major decisions in my life: working in diverse fields
(the ‘white cubes’, the ‘streets’ and in nature), and merging both my practices (artistic and meditative).
Later on, it evolved into the choice to become a nomad.
I've been on the move since 2017, letting the work lead the way across countries and continents,
without a permanent home-base. Every new place drives the process and vice-versa. Each project acts as a temporary refuge
and the stage where the fleeting takes form. And while it results in tangible works, the essence of this process is performative.
Art & Life exist in the very act of perceiving, of creating, and in the temporary nature of both.
* * *
Technique & Breakdown of series over the years
My technique is mixed-media. I integrate fine-art and industrial materials and tools:
From tools typically used for building walls or floor tiles, to soft watercolor brushes, pallet knives, print rollers and metal scrapers.
Acrylic paints, inks and markers are mixed with various mediums such as glazing liquid, conditioner and silicone oil,
substances that impact the behavior of the pigments in unexpected ways. In the streets, I use hand cut letters and elements made with yarn, fabric, treated foam and duct-tape.
Early works:
In my time as a student, the early works ("Red Heart", 2007/8 and 2009) were naïve, minimalistic drawings.
Bodies and situations, subtle yet disturbing. Figures floating in white spaces.
After graduating and over time, extra layers appeared ("Illusions & Reality", 2010-2012 and 2013),
representing the struggle to grow and resolve past, present and future.
In these formative years, I practiced a slow Sisyphean process in which every piece took months. Then a change took place,
and my practice shifted into a quick, dance-like ritual. ("Release", 2014-2016). These paintings were done in one continuous session, each session lasting between a day to three days of constant work, stopping only for food and short stints of sleep.
The Serendipity Experiment 2017-2021
Between 2017 to 2021 I was immersed in an experimental performance, together with my partner in Mind The Heart! Project.
Our premise was to accept the unknown as an artistic tool, by committing fully to relinquishing control.
We followed the first rule of Improv theater - SAY YES. For this purpose, we donated all our belongings, moved to live in a van
in a foreign country, and invited strangers to dictate our route, schedule, and next encounters. At each point we were sent to, we created public works, daily. What was planned for one year ended up lasting four, spanning more than 60,000 miles (100,000 km) in 48 states across the U.S.A. as well as other countries.
The Unimaginable Horizon 2021-2024 (and ongoing)
Living on the road for four years (of which two in the pandemic), while committing to the totality which the performance necessitated, heralded another big shift in my process. Returning to a normative studio setting in late 2021 uncovered the tantalizing realization that previous inspirations and techniques now felt irrelevant. I couldn’t just pick up from where I left off.
The journey had fundamentally changed the way I perceived stability, home, possessions, necessity.
It altered the way I lived and subsequently, the way I created.
It felt crucial to allow the full breadth of my experiences to manifest directly onto the canvas, and these experiences were
too expansive to fit into figurative works, such as the ones I created before. My previous areas of research,
such as archetypes and mythologies, felt more like crutches than points of reference.
Free from the need to adhere to one "coherent" idea or to convey a comprehensible image,
an uninhibited expression was unleashed and with it, a flood of intuitive works.
Since 2021 I’ve painted over fifty abstract paintings. They represent a form of cartography –
to places familiar and unknown, to blocked paths and to new roads.
CV / Resume
Solo Exhibitions
2024
Neither Here Nor There, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, Georgia, USA
2023
Bodies of Work, ONKAF Gallery, New Delhi, India
2022
The Unimaginable Horizon, AG18 Gallery, Vienna, Austria
2019
Form, Re-Form, AG18 Gallery, Vienna, Austria
2017
Outside looking in, National Art Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand
2016
Split Ends, Tel Aviv Artist House, Israel
2013
Spark, Zadik Gallery, Jaffa, Israel
Process, Tel Aviv City Municipality Arts and Culture division, Israel
2012
Rise!, Tsuk Gallery, Netanya, Israel
Heartbeats, Weiss House, Tel Aviv, Israel
2010
Strings, Artists House, Tel Aviv, Israel
Group Exhibitions
2024
Twenty Four Windows, Fifth Floor Gallery, SAPH, Shanghai, China
2019
Metamorphosis: The Place of the Past in the Present, CITYarts, Orlando, FL, USA
2017
ARTROOMS, Meliá White House, London, England
Radical Love, Crypt Gallery, London, England
2016
Wire/less Connections, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Vitrinart, The Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
Grand Opening, Milu Gallery Hotel, Florence, Italy
2015
Stories the Streets tell, The Israeli Children’s Museum, Holon, Israel
Hamekarer, The Old Wholesale Marketplace, Tel Aviv, Israel
S2G, kulturkueche, Mönchengladbach, Germany
Presence, Tirosh Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
Temporary Crew, St.Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
2014
Slideluck III, Tel Aviv, Israel
Launching Meshuna, Meshuna Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
2013
Testing Tools Festival #10, Beit Tami, Tel Aviv, Israel
Note to Selves, Container, Jaffa port, Israel
7F, 7th Floor, Tel Aviv, Israel
Base Colors #2, IIsrael-Lebanon border, Peace & Activism Art event
2012
Heroes in Distress, Art Basel, Miami, Overture/Scope art fair, USA
Once I was a House, art event, Caesarea, Israel
Small Scale - 20\20, Zadik Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
Creation Cycle, Hangar 2, Jaffa Port, Israel
Free Art Friday, Tel Aviv, Israel
Spring Festival, Shapira neighborhood, Tel Aviv, Israel
Base Colors #1, Israel-Syria border, Peace & Activism Art event
On the Fence #3, Jaffa, Israel
Love Art Make Art, Open Studio, Tel Aviv, Israel
2011
Haifa Walks, Haifa Museum of Art, Israel
ZEMIKEA, Tsuk Gallery, Netanya, Israel
Mind the Heart, The Container, Tel Aviv, Israel
Sea Breeze, Artist Residency, Bat Yam, Israel
On the Fence #2, Jaffa, Israel
Mind the Heart, Dining Room, Tel Aviv, Israel
Ward Nasse, Ward Nasse Gallery, New York, USA
2010
Cannons & Muses, Tama University of Art, Tokyo, Japan
de:frost Festival, Jerusalem, Israel
2009
Biennial #2, Herzliya, Israel
Secret Art #4, Beit Mani, Tel Aviv, Israel
Love Art Make Art, Open Studio, Tel Aviv, Israel
Tan, P8 Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
1.2.3.4 I Declare an Art War, Shorashim Gallery, Israel
White Trash, Tel Aviv, Israel
2008
It’s a Small Big World, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
2005-2007
Designers of the Future, Tel Aviv, Reading Power Station, Israel
International Woman’s Day, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Dialogue, Tzavta Theater, Tel Aviv, Israel
Residencies
2023
Swatch Art Peace Hotel Residency, Shanghai, China (June-September)
Windgate Residency, KSU University, GA, USA (September-October)
Core Dance Company, Atlanta, USA (April-May)
2022
Roza Center for International and Interdisciplinary Art, Krakow, Poland (June)
2019
the Sichow Foundation, Krakow, Poland (Feb)
2019
Halcyon House fellowship, Shortlisted
Collaborations & Public Actions (under Mind the Heart! Project)
2023
Wishing Wall, mural & masterclasses, Georgia Highlands College, Cartersville, GE, USA
MTH! in Kennesaw, masterclasses, School of Art, Kennesaw, GA, USA
Mantra, mural, Core Dance, Atlanta, GE, USA
2022
SEED & NTTL, mural & performance, Rosa Foundation, Krakow, Poland
Looking at Place, exhibition, Katzman Contemporary, Dover, NH, USA
O/Art, fundraiser for Ukraine, Atlanta-Chattanooga, TN & GA, USA
2021
Introduce Yourself, exhibition, Kliger Gallery, Lund, Sweden
2019
The Poland Project, mural & performance, Sichow Foundation, Artist Residency, Krakow, Poland
2018
New Poetics of Labor, Al camello camello y al amor amor, exhibition, Espacio, Medellín, Colombia
MTH! in D.C., event, By The People Arts Festival (Smithsonian, National Cathedral, Union Market, Walter Reed, Arc West, D.C., USA
Bodies of Water, permanent installation & masterclasses, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, USA
The Spaces Between #1, exhibition, JCC, Foster City, CA, USA
The Spaces Between #2, exhibition & mural, PJCC, San Rafael, CA, USA
MTH! in Houston, exhibition, City Hall & Brown Convention Center, Houston, TX, USA
Towards One, permanent installation, Building 98, Marfa, TX, USA
2017
Be Here Now, permanent installation, Creative Discovery Museum, Chattanooga, TN, USA
MTH! in Hillary R. Clinton Library, event, Little Rock, AR, USA
MTH! in Atlanta, exhibition, Decatur Art Alliance, Decatur, GA, USA
MTH! in Apopka, permanent installation, HCC, Apopka, FL, USA
MTH! in Portsmouth, exhibition, Prescott Park & 3S Gallery, Portsmouth, NH, USA
MTH! in Tel Aviv, Pilot for USA Tour at Beit Tami, Tel Aviv, Israel
Publications and Books
2022 "Unravelling Women’s Art, by PL Henderson, Aurora Metro books, England
2018 "Al camello camello y al amor amor" by Cristina Velásquez, NPOL, Colombia
2016 "Wall, wall" by Dominque Lafon, France
2015 "Street Messages" by Nicholas Ganz, Dokument Press, Germany
2013 TEDx TLV Talk: "Creating out of not knowing"- the creation of SPARK Solo Exhibition >> to see the talk
* Curitorial texts: www.mayagelfman.com/curatorial-texts >> to read the texts
Press & selected articles: www.mayagelfman.com/press
Selected collections
Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai, China
Lettenmayer & partners, Czech Republic
Goldman, Erlich, Gaver, Edelstein & Co. Law, Israel
Historic Building 98. Marfa TX, USA
Creative Discovery Museum, Chattanooga TN, USA
MILU Art Hotel, Florence, Italy
Magdas Hotel, Vienna, Austria
Herzliya Municipal Library, Israel
M & M Schmitz, Vienna Austria
R. Saker, Caesarea, Israel
O. Shatil, Tel Aviv, Israel
S. Sternbach, Tel Aviv, Israel
H. Bornstein, Tel Aviv, Israel
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