Maya Silverberg

Featured in Surface Tension, 2025

Being one of the first artists selected for this exhibition, Maya Silverberg informed the theme and selection of artists in many ways. We first encountered her work in January and were captivated by the intricate layering and masterful use of materials in her work. She seamlessly merges different mediums into carefully crafted pieces that invite the viewer on a journey into the substance of the materials used. 

Navigating the space between image and object, Maya blends photography, sculpture, and traditional craft to challenge how we understand and perceive surfaces. Drawing on her background as a traditionally-trained trompe l’œil painter, she employs techniques like screenprinting, faux finishing, and risograph printing to create layered works that resist passive viewing. In Phalanx Formation, she deploys varying levels of simulation through a plywood table decoratively painted to mimic cherry wood, using photography to both disguise and activate the sculptural form. Her playful engagement with materials—velvet, paper, plywood, leather, canvas and her deep interrogation of craft and medium position photography not simply as a tool but as an extension of making. Through Maya’s work, the photographic becomes tactile, elusive, and performative, opening the exhibition to consider surface as a site of both depth and disruption.

Artist Bio

Maya Silverberg (b. 1999) is a Hungarian-American artist from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in London. Guided by the iterative physicality of making, she constructs works that exist between image and object, integrating craft and trade techniques and aesthetics. Her work encompasses photography, collage, sculpture, screenprint, and painting. She layers and translates between these techniques, creating works with multiple material registers in order to investigate the logics and limits of technological mediation. Using appropriated readymades and original sculptures as supports, she incorporates traditional faux painting techniques alongside the technical and visual vernacular of carpentry and building. Maya’s work deploys varying levels of simulation, often exposed and undone, demarcated by architectural thresholds or conventional decorations. These perspectival, theatrical objects reimagine interior spaces as sites of production.

Maya completed her MA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2025 and previously studied at Columbia University, New York, and the Van der Kelen Institute of Decorative Painting in Brussels. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Art Market Budapest, Norito Gallery, and the Gerald Moore Gallery. She is a recipient of the Sarabande Foundation Slade MA Final Year Award and the Bartolomeu dos Santos Memorial Award. Her first solo exhibition, Horseshoe Theory, will take place at DOXA Budapest in October 2025.

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