Aaron Garber-Maikovska

Aaron Garber-Maikovska works in large-scale abstract paintings, performance and video. He places the bright white boards on the floor and fills them with clusters of colour in oil, pastels, wax and raw pigments made by the artist himself. The huge scribbles, only seemingly random, propose complex and cryptic narratives that contemplate on the notions of identity, fatherhood, memory and communication. The intimate tangibility of the personal and his body runs across his practice: his performance works, which serve as a source material for his paintings, incorporate the kinetic elements of dance, rhythmic movement and spoken utterances. Garber-Maikovska places his performances in late-capitalist and neo-libreal settings of shopping centres, chain restaurants, parking lots, and repetitive suburban areas. The video documentation of his works echoes the performative turn of the 1960s and 1970s when conceptual art’s happenings were animating the art discourse. Garber-Maikovska’s “guerilla” performances are inspired by an intuitive process of intervention and narrative-constructing around the mysteries of reality. In both his performance and paintings, Garber-Maikovska explores the dimensions of what it means to be human, proclaiming, to put it in the artist’s words, “we are here, and we don’t know why.” Written by Goldsmiths CCA