Maya Sibul Portfolio

This collection by Maya Sibul functions as both retrospective and prospective, guiding us through its evolution from past to present. Rather than acting as a static and particular body of work, this series foregrounds years-long experimentation through all possible forms—line, color, shape, subject, mediums, and materials—thus capturing the movement of an artist sharpening and deepening their visual practice in real-time.

Sibul is concerned with people, their abstractions, their dynamics, and representations, which she deconstructs and reassembles with bold and bursting work. Earlier pieces include a series of colored pencil illustrations made during the artist’s teenage years, an initial foray into imagined scenic illustration and portraiture. Sibul was interested in the ways familial relationships (and reproductive labor) were traditionally depicted (or absented), working from a series of references but also, she says, “mostly, without reference.” 

She notes, “I was interested in ‘warping’ what might be considered traditional posed family scenes—their placid still-lifeness—and the baggage and histories they carry along with them.” The colors are feverish, lines melting or “unravel[ing], into spiral or cross-hatching, where the presence of a hand at work cannot be overlooked, where its compulsions must be confronted.”

This connective tissue follows into Sibul’s more recent works, where she shifts into deeper experimentation with oil paint and smaller-scale portraiture.

“Paint has forced me to confront shapes and shadows in a completely different way. Linework is no longer my motor because it cannot be. I think that transition—figuring it out—is palpable in the newer images. But the thickness and dimensionality of oil paint, the ways it attaches to linen and canvas and wood, moves me with equal measure. I want to make paint speak.” 

As we follow her across the breadth of her work, Sibul’s striking visual language remains the same. Underneath the bright colours, the paintings are rich with an emotional urgency, the brushstrokes alive and moving, like a pulse jumping close to the skin.

“The physicality of illustration functions for me as a sort of compulsion, a way of inhabiting an environment or being in the world. A body in motion. I want that sense of urgency and habit—urgency through the banality of habit—to be evident in the experience of the images.”