Some artworks ask us to look for a subject, a face or a story. Maya Hayuk’s paintings first offer a sensation. Bands of color cross, mirror and overflow. The geometry seems carefully organized until a drip interrupts it. I love that tension: a painting with a clear direction that still allows the gesture to change its mind. Just days before her first solo exhibition in France, the Ukrainian-American artist invites us to experience color physically.
Geometry That Refuses to Behave
Maya Hayuk’s paintings can look like electric tapestries. Slanting lines, mirrored diagonals and hypnotic repetitions could form a closed system. Yet the paint stays alive. It drips, overlaps and reveals the time spent making the work. We move between the feeling of a precisely calculated pattern and that of an improvisation. The painting breathes in the space between those two impressions.
Her language is not confined to spectacular murals. It moves between studio painting, printmaking, photography, graphic design, textiles and installations. That freedom of medium matters: the forms are not locked into one format. They can fit inside a frame, stretch across a wall or change the way we move through a room.
Ukrainian Roots, Urban Landscapes
Born in Baltimore to Ukrainian refugee parents, Maya Hayuk lives in Brooklyn. Her work connects the visual culture of the street with Ukrainian folk and textile traditions. It would be too simple to treat these references as a collection of decorative patterns. They form a vocabulary of repetition, inherited gestures and colors that carry memory. Heritage can be present in abstraction without becoming a literal illustration.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, her relationship with her family’s homeland has also taken on the dimension of a commitment. For the Paris exhibition, organizers describe work informed in part by a recent stay in Ukraine, as well as explorations of embroidery, video and the Ukrainian language. Color does not erase the gravity of the world; it can become one way of responding to it.
When Painting Escapes the Frame
Hayuk has created monumental interventions in cities around the world. On a wall, her compositions become more than images: they meet light, architecture and passersby. They acquire a different scale and speed. What might have been a pattern becomes an environment. I appreciate that this painting does not demand expertise in contemporary art before it can be felt.
Her career also reaches into music and graphic collaborations, including projects associated with M.I.A., TV on the Radio and the Beastie Boys. This dialogue is more than a footnote: there is something musical in the rhythm, pulse and repetition of her work. Diagonals answer one another like measures; colors overlap like sounds.
Wingspan(s): A Paris Encounter
From November 7, 2026 to February 27, 2027, the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin in Paris’s twentieth arrondissement hosts Envergure(s) – Wingspan(s). Presented with Art Azoï and curated by Élise Herszkowicz, Hayuk’s first solo exhibition in France is expected to feature a majority of works created on site. The project also looks back across thirty years of studio painting, with loans from Alice Gallery in Brussels.
That site-specific dimension seems essential to me. Visitors will not simply see what the artist made elsewhere; they will discover what her forms become in conversation with a particular building. With its generous volumes and history, the Carré de Baudouin may give this painting an almost architectural scale. Admission is free at 121 rue de Ménilmontant: an invitation to be immersed in color that has no wish to remain discreet.
