About

Artist Statement

On Maja's art

My work shows both elements of installation, performance – episodically reconstructed events in a milieu which is often city, and the character of more or less integrated forms found in the urban landscape. The point of departure is an idea where the message has both poetic and existential character. Aesthetically I am at home in the conceptual traditions of art and I always address a larger part of the beholder than merely the cognitive and reflecting aspect. I contemplate the fundamental conditions of life in my art. 

Sound is an essential aspect of my work, but not the only one, because I use many different matters. I do not produce esthetic objects. My art is more a way of producing relations and processes even in the cases when the final result is an object or an installation or a book etc.

My works are always in relation to a certain room, physical or mental, and to those who take part in it by looking, moving around, listening, feeling, speaking. I have located many of my projects in urban public places; my expressed desire is to reach people who are not part of the professional art system while also being connected with a more fundamental desire to eradicate the differences between art and life.

Photo: Kristina Strand Larsson, 2015

Drawing – a breath of life

One of my earliest childhood memories is of lying on my tummy on the floor surrounded by a veritable ocean of sheets of paper and crayons. 
I remember drawing as the delight of all delights; an indescribable feeling of bliss. 
This is still the case. Days when I don’t draw can easily engender in me a sense of agitation and imbalance. With a pencil in my hand I am in harmony with the world; elated, quite simply...

From the artist's text in the monograph "Maja Spasova, Drawings"

Thomas Millroth, art critic, writer, chef editor Olof Bright:

Maja Spasova´s work can be described in many ways. One being different systems or parameters meeting temporarily to create new spaces. Sound is always important. Sight and sound. Sounds to things and vice versa. The room created is being measured and tried by sound, which in itself is another sphere with its own possibilities. Maja Spasova has always used it in her own way to create both nearness and fruitful disorder. In her videos, performances, installations sound is always present creating a new space to be examined, bringing the things to sounds, where borders or limits outside our own body and mind are of no importance.

Anders Olofsson, art critic, writer, chef editor www.konsten.net:

In stark contrast to both minimalism and purely conceptual art, Spasova recreates the religious space which has long been absent from art. This does not, however, appear as a “message”, nor as a cosmetic theme added on afterwards but is the result of an attitude to life. Spasova demonstrates life’s fundamental values, not for consideration but to be dealt with physically, by moving our bodies through the room which has been deprived of all prefabricated functionality. Since the possibility of relying on accepted concepts has been eliminated, the only way out is to enter wholly into the experience of the contradictions inherent in the elements and the situation, in the tension out of which the experience of the sublime or divine grows.

Beate Sydhoff, art critic, writer, former Culture Attaché at Swedish Embassy, NY, former director of Culture House Stockholm:

The issue of the conception of truth suffices Maja Spasova’s art. This theme is found in virtually all her work and is as much directed towards herself as the world around us. The real core of art, she seems to be saying, is to bring up truths and work against hidden and insidious messages. Since the closest neighbor of truth is skepticism, a struggle between the truth of the message and this skepticism is discernible throughout her oeuvre. The outcome is not a given. The artist’s search for truth should be grasped as testing the balance—where are we to place the border between positive powers and skepticism’s healthy introspection?

Niclas Ostlind, curator, writer, professor at the University of Gothenburg:

In a world of art in which irony and other distancing approaches are often used as protection against close contact and commitment, content that is unguarded and seriously meant is often looked upon with a degree of indulgence. And so one can readily imagine that the elevated mood that is characteristic of Maja Spasova's art makes some of the beholders rather uncomfortable. Her preoccupation with the great subjects of love, time, death and the beyond as well as the issues of guilt and reconciliation in a deeper sense, are clearly provocative (which reactions to many of her works clearly demonstrates).

Elisabet Haglund, curator, writer, museum director:


In Maja Spasova’s drawings I have often felt that she is trying to catch hold of the invisible forces and relations that exist around us. In her art, movement is not restricted to a vertical mode. Like the earthworm, it digs its way forward wherever it wants. Wim Wenders believes in passion as the force that can transform us. It is only passion that seems to be able to get the angel to leave its eternally humdrum existence. Passion in love. And, like passion, it is a hazardous game in art too. Like an equilibristic number on the flying trapeze. Together with birds and angels in unrestricted flight, Maja Spasova colours the heavens anew.


Christian Chambert, art critic, writer, president of the Swedish Section of AICA:

Maja Spasova’s oeuvre is simultaneously playfully abstract and transparent. She has literally worked underground with Stockholm’s ”Räddningscentral” as well as up in the air in ”The last prophecy/judgment”. She has introduced a working method in the Swedish milieu akin to Dada, Fluxus, and happenings reminiscent of the 1960s’ open art. She seeks the truth and is a researcher as well as an activist in the tradition of the early 20th century, modernistic and rebellious.