Exhibition "Envergure(s) – Wingspan(s)" by Maya Hayuk

Through symmetry disrupted by drips, Maya explores gesture, softening it to form waves, curves, and organic, moving shapes. The vitality of her work is also found in the various textures, the transparency of certain hues, and colors that bleed, like an overflow of energy, a vital flux that spills over. Her works, like an image unfolded along a symmetrical axis, mobilize vibrant colors and vivid, supple shapes that overlap and echo each other on both sides of the painting.

The influence of modernist abstraction in a contemporary urban version blends with inspiration found in Ukrainian folk art patterns, repeated and structured like weaving. Her iconic, improvised murals bear witness to the artist's obsession with symmetry, "perfect imperfection," puzzles, and the space between inside and outside, while evoking woven, knitted, and embroidered works re-proportioned to a monumental scale. Maya Hayuk's vibrant pictorial abstractions are inspired by various references to Ukrainian Easter eggs, Mexican woven blankets, mandalas, and other references drawn from kinetic art.

Who is Maya Hayuk?

Born in 1969 in Baltimore to Ukrainian refugee parents, Maya Hayuk lives in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she also studied at the University of Odessa in Ukraine. Her highly recognizable work draws from textile tradition and weaves links between Ukrainian folklore and the strong color language of urban art. Her large structures, composed of wide, intersecting bands of color, are inspired by Ukrainian folk art designs (Pysanka), mandalas, images from the Hubble telescope, holograms, and Rorschach tests.

A painter, muralist, photographer, graphic designer, gallery owner, environmentalist, and author, Maya has always collaborated with other artists, producing album covers, videos, sets, photographs, and posters for M.I.A., TV on the Radio, and the Beastie Boys, among others. Maya Hayuk has exhibited and created monumental in-situ pictorial interventions all over the world, which have become iconic, appearing as sensitive cartographies or articulating a tension between control and chance.

A joint effort between Art Azoï and the Carré de Baudouin

For this first solo exhibition in France, the Carré de Baudouin and Art Azoï are offering the artist Maya Hayuk the opportunity to create the majority of her works in situ. The exhibition will benefit from a significant installation period so the artist can engage in contextual work inspired by the territory in which it is being presented, as well as the two months she spent in Ukraine this summer. Maya explores numerous mediums—paper, textile, video, among others—that allow her to sculpt her various geometric and symmetrical abstractions as she pleases. She will present a retrospective of 30 years of studio painting through works loaned by her historic gallery in Brussels, Alice Gallery. She will also address her commitment to Ukraine, her resistance work, and the exploration of her country of origin through embroidery, as well as video and the Ukrainian language.

The immersive nature of her proposals will integrate into the characteristic and monumental spaces of the Carré de Baudouin, which will allow her to create "cathedral" works.

Did you know?

Since 2011, the association Art Azoï has been working to promote and disseminate artistic creation in public space and carries out large-scale cultural projects in close connection with the territories in which it operates, with French and international artists. The association intends to foster contemporary creation and structure its production to support artists on often multidisciplinary in-situ projects: exhibitions, temporary and permanent installations, programming walls, cultural events.

A space for meetings and exchanges, the Carré de Baudouin is a cultural center managed by the 20th arrondissement town hall that promotes contemporary creation in all its forms. Located in a former 18th-century folly, it now hosts exhibition halls and an auditorium, nestled in a green setting. Open to all audiences and accessible for free, the Carré de Baudouin offers exhibitions, organizes events, and regularly develops projects with local structures. Each year, two to three exhibitions are organized with a special focus on current artistic creation. Around each exhibition, a free program is designed and offered in connection with the artists and curators: guided tours, meetings with artists, artistic workshops... Listed as a historical monument in 1928, the building has successively been a vacation spot, an orphanage, a medico-social center, a youth hostel, and today a cultural center.