Maya Bloch. Life goes on without me

About

Under the title ‘Life goes on without me’ Bloch is showing a new group of predominantly monochrome figure paintings in graphite washes and coloured pencil on canvas.

The pictures represent dream-like scenes that seem to play out on and at the peripheries of family gatherings long since passed. They feature mainly female characters, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. Some of the figures are reproduced almost naturalistically; others are subject to expressionist distortion. They bring to mind motifs from James Enzor, Edvard Munch, Marc Chagall and the early Lyonel Feininger, though both their form and their content are explicitly involved with the concerns of contemporary painting.

For what Bloch negotiates here in nostalgic garb and with innovative painterly means is a theme that has again become highly topical in the art of the present: that of the human form. But she does more than just explore the pictorial potential of various forms of representation. She also investigates the consequences of their physical juxtaposition and temporal coexistence, creating multi-layered genre pictures and portraits that move between perception, memory and fiction.