07.27.09
“Maya Bloch’s paintings focus on the depiction of human figures – group portraits in round-the-dinner-table scenes – alongside single portraits of women, some in a forest environment. Anna Veronica was the original, now almost forgotten, name of Bloch’s mother, before she was granted a new, Hebrew one, upon her arrival in Israel at the age of five. Its employment does not point to a preoccupation with the artist’s biography, but vice versa – to a kind of metaphorical ghost symbolizing for her the possibility of otherness to inhabit a familiar space and the possibility of melding real and fictional biographies. This doubling is expressed in the way Bloch produces the subjects of her portraits, which are based on photographs she culls from newspapers, other people’s family albums and the internet; she ‘harasses’ these family photographs and ‘imports’ them into her own world, in this way resuscitating unknown identities and making up other people’s emotional worlds. But even though she relates to the photographs’ characteristics by borrowing their compositions, she does not search for a realist context but rather dredges up the dark psychic situations that lie behind the photographed figures’ representational ‘poses.'”
Got a tip on this one in my email. All I can say is wow. Seriously beautiful and contemplative body of work centered squarely on the human condition. Just beautiful all the the way through. You can see her work at her website or see much much more in her Flickr pages.
