Maïa Evarista Charlotte Ibar
Basque Country, France
Biography:
Maïa Evarista Charlotte Ibar is a French/Basque-American artist who works across mediums including painting, video, installation, sound, and performance. She received her MFA in painting from The New York Studio School in 2009 and attended Pratt Institute, Parsons Paris, and recently The Mountain School of Arts, MSA^ in Los Angeles. In 2018 Maïa and Malado Baldwin co-curated/presented “X Marks the Spot: Women of the New York Studio School”. In 2015 she was invited to collaborate with the Basque Cultural Institute in research that culminated in large-scale immersive painting and performance. In 2014, Ibar co-founded the gallery and artist residency Pioche Projects in Biarritz, France, where she curates artists and projects from a variety of creative, scientific, alternative, and spiritual practices.
Her musical/visual and performative projects go under the name Dual-Split, Rita and The Labyrinth, and Lighter. She has performed and recorded with the Brooklyn-based band TEEN, and Pete Kember (Sonic Boom, Spaceman 3), and many others. She has done music supervision/consulting and scoring for the upcoming documentary by director Nadia Szold, “Larry Flynt For President” that got into the Tribeca Film Festival in 2020. She is currently collaborating on scoring and music supervision for a forthcoming documentary in Los Angeles. Maia has been investigating her artistic processes as rituals connected and related to the mind, body, and spirit. The journey and process are a way to teach herself about her subconsciousness, revealing her deepest emotions and the path that her life has given her.
She studied with Ken Tighe, Chris Martin, Bill Jensen, Margrit Lewczuk, Graham Nickson, Ophrah Shemesh, Carl Plansky, and the NYSS/Brooklyn Rail gang. She has sold work to the private collection of David McKee among others.
Link - www.maiaibar.com
Instagram @maiaibar
Maïa Evarista Charlotte Ibar says |
“ Spirits appear to me with personalities and character. They grow inside of my head organically like a plant. It starts small and little by little the pieces grow from each other like a tree. There is something bigger out there that I'm trying to connect to: Maybe it's the cosmos or maybe it's the unknown. There is balance and unbalance. I believe my mind fluctuates between these two points. Sometimes there is order, in composition, in color harmony, the order in my emotions that translate directly into clear symbols. Other times, I am not in control, I cannot even begin to describe it here because that would mean that I know it and that I am in control of it. It is the unbalance in me, it is the unknown in life, in what we don't understand, in the issues that are destructive to balance. The un-aesthetic, the chaos, life and death, the frustration of what isn't good, what isn't beautiful; This is the side that fights me and that I have to express through my art. I seek to let myself trust what I don't know. That is what I am trying to get to when I am working. It is the thing that makes us be, the automatic sense that makes us breathe. It is what makes us trust and continue.”