Biography
Maya Gelfman, b.1978. A nomad.
Based in the U.S.A - on the move, (in between U.S.A and the EU).
Gelfman’s work has exhibited extensively. With eleven solo exhibitions under her belt, six international residencies, and dozens of group shows. Her works were featured at the the 60th Venice Biennale, Italy (2024), the Zuckerman Museum of Art, USA (2024), the National Gallery, Thailand (2017), the Israel National Museum (2016), and art fairs in London, Monaco, Brussles, Miami, and Washington D.C.
Notable residency programs include the SAPH (China) and Windgate (USA), and was shortlisted for
the Halcyon Fellowship (2019). Her work was published in the media and in international art-books
(in London, Germany, France, Colombia and USA), and can be found in private and public collections, including Lettenmayer & partners, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Creative Discovery Museum, Historic Building 98, Milu Hotel, Rivka Saker, Hagit Borenstein, Goldman, Erlich, Gaver, Edelstein & Co. Law.
Beyond institutional spaces, she gave a TEDx talk on her intentional practice (2013).
She co-founded 'Mind the Heart!' Project (2009), together with Roie Avidan. A street-art project that has reached over 100 cities globally. In 2017 they embarked on The Serendipity Experiment, a public performance committed to “Saying Yes”. Strangers they met on the road sent them on a winding route across North America, spanning four years and 100,000 km. Gelfman has been on the move ever since.
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From painting to installation, performance to street-art, Gelfman uses her body to investigate transformation. Her practice is immersive and deliberately spontaneous. Rooted in “site and time specific” methodologies: it's facilitated by movement and change, and propelled by a commitment to impermanence.
By utilizing somatic techniques she engages with the sensory field, both around and within her. Brushstrokes synchronize with breath, sounds navigate the gestures of the hands and feet, colors
and textures emerge from the landscape, the time of day, the season. Her works are psycho-geographic explorations. Mapping the places she inhabit, both physicallyand emotionally. In this slow, performative process she serves as both an observer and a participant.
Her approach draws inspiration from Fluxus, action painting, improv theory, and meditation.
But this fascination with the immediate and the visceral goes even further, it's deeply personal.
A near-death experience during a heart surgery at age four and the long recovery that followed,
instilled in her an embodied understanding of impermanence. It still fuels the urgency and totality
with which she creates today.
Born in 1978 to a family of immigrants that had fled from Moldova (at the time, the USSR) to Israel,
she navigates shifting prisms such as change, fragility, resilience, beauty and decay. In 2017 she chose
to become a nomad, and has been traveling the world ever since. It’s a life-path and an artistic-path.
