Maya Silverberg

“I am a London-based artist from Brooklyn, New York, currently pursuing an MA in Painting at the Slade. After graduating from Columbia University with a BA in Art History, I studied trompe l’oeil and decorative painting at the Van der Kelen Institute in Brussels, Belgium. 

Harnessing my background training as a traditionally-trained trompe l’oeil painter, I produce self-reflective works that investigate painting’s fraught status as both a fine and decorative art. Guided by the concept of illegibility and the iterative physicality of making, I paint things that exist between image and object. Through my practice, I interrogate the visual economy of trompe l’oeil and mimesis through an enactment of the aphorism “Man thinks with his hand,” understanding concept as fundamentally intertwined with process.

My work deploys varying levels of simulation, always exposed and undone, often punctured by architectural thresholds or interior objects. These perspectival, theatrical spaces and objects treat the interior as an assemblage of language, rather than a site for the domestic. What are the minimally sufficient conditions for simulation?”