Maya Bloch

Maya Bloch paints figures based on strangers’ family photographs, but the term ‘portrait’ doesn’t quite apply to her depictions of out-of-context, abstracted faces and bodies that seems to morph into formlessness. Speaking of her urge to “ruin” the characters she paints by “erasing them” with color, Bloch explains, “There is always the need to stop existing, to minimize my presence in creating the works, trying to be unaware of what I'm doing.” Working in acrylic, Bloch is known for flat, color-saturated, ghostly subjects that have been described as painterly with a photographic sheen and compared to the dehumanized figures of Marlene Dumas and Francis Bacon. She distorts her scenes under the belief that “by trying to paint something from reality and translating it ‘wrongly’ it breeds another reality, reality of painting.”