Maia del Estal
2023
Artist Statement
Through my practice, I interplay access to my emotional experience, lyrical inner voice, and visionary imagination, alongside with explicit display of my own body. With the intention of complete giving, my work exposes my biography, sexuality, and inner wounds, as a way to shed light on the things that we repress, that we keep silent. I paint in large format, often during intense, trancelike, states of performative gesture. Abstract mindscapes and zoomorphic ‘creatures’, laying bare affective needs and dependencies, showing human decadence with humor and satirical irony. My aim is to ironize monstrosity to avoid becoming a victim of it.
Bio
Maia del Estal ( Argentina, 1993) is a self-taught painter, poet, performance artist and Ikebana practitioner based in Brooklyn. She grew up in a family of artists and political dissidents, influenced by the queer countercolture of Buenos Aires. Maia started painting and writing poetry around 14 years old and participated in many group shows and solo exhibitions. In 2015 she begins studying Ikenaba acquiring flower arrangement in her artistic practice as a personal method for emotional rebalance. Maia moves to NYC in 2017, where she started working on a series of videos exploring ways to deliver poetry, performance and sound installation.