Maya Schenk is a Swiss and German artist of Transylvanian heritage living in Berlin. Her artistic practice often involves the simultaneous creation of music alongside painting. She is currently interested in doppelgängers.
Existing constantly in liminal spaces – between the inner and the outer, ephemerality and transcendence, strength and powerlessness, acceptance and defiance – there is an assuredness of uncertainty in the paintings of Maya Schenk. Her paintings evoke fixed points in time; beating hearts, abject sorrow and dejection, moments gesturing towards piercing clarity of understanding. Schenk’s seemingly carefree, at times, brutal brushstrokes serve to both exaggerate and understate the alla prima paintings, charcoal outlines leaving us unsure where meaning resides. Standing in contrast to artists working towards the contemporary embedded in now; she paints that which always has and always will be. We see a chair or a table, a book if we are lucky. Yet, mainly we see faces, faces and bodies in profound states.
//Selected exhibitions:
Maya Schenk fka Marla Born
Juni- September 2010, ‘Cruel, Love, Joke, Liberation’ , Hôtel de Ville, Fribourg, CH
August 2012 , ‘Not an Olympic’ , Slaughter House, Arch 372, Geffrye Street, Hoxton, London, UK
September 2012, ‘Shift’, Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, London E28JD, UK
June 2013 , ‘Salon des Refusés’ , 12-18 Hoxton Street, London N16NG, UK
December 2017 , Naughty & Nice, Espacio Gallery, 159 Bethnal Green Rd,, London, E2 7DG, UK
Oktober 2020, ‘Intuition’, CULTURE.ROOM, Auguststr. 10, 10117 Berlin, D
August 2021, Hidden Creatives, U Bahn Station Friedrichstrasse, 10117 Berlin
Oktober 2021, In der Metalli, Metalli, Industriestrasse 15B/1.OG, 6300 Zug, CH
sources.
Phantasmagoria is a multimedia project centering around persistent thoughts and their manifestations compromising of seven oil paintings, accompanying music and an overlayed projection. The cast of characters in the portraits represent those gliding around one’s mind when sleepless, delirious or creating. They taunt and provoke, shout and sabotage, their jeers echoing endlessly. A revolving door of unwelcome guests who seem to know one another, constantly swapping places at the table, feasting on whoever they can see in front of them. A phantasmagoria of phantoms that keep on hanging around in the morning.
