Maia Shiran (b. 1980) was born in Jerusalem and raised in Brazil and Uruguay. After graduating high school, she returned to Israel alone and founded and managed a startup company that she listed, only seven years later, on the London Stock Exchange. She then established an anthroposophic school in Moshav Tzofit. Over the years, she studied calligraphy, Japanese embroidery, and painting at the Station and Kolel schools in Tel Aviv. She creates large-scale oil paintings in her studio, including polyptychs, varied textures, crushed stone and sand. She is completing her MFA at Haifa University and has won the Crista and Nikolaus Schues Collection, Hamburg purchase prize.

The repetition, different layers, textures and intensity of matter and color express transitions within a personal story and an attempt to hold on to a particular moment I experienced before a cedar tree during the war. The polyptych Cedar Tree consists of nine large paintings divided into three triptychs ranging from earth colors to cool, airy oranges. During my work in the studio, through a repetitive process of dismantling and abstraction, I seek to present more than one reading of the relation between the tree and its surroundings. The painterly act and the playfulness of the branches are means through which I explore invisible powers and relations that act around me and appear as magic from the meeting of material and color. The tree structure is present throughout the work, yet often is both present and invisible and sometimes becomes a landscape. I am curious about the relationship between the landscape and the tree and how I can sense their existence. Throughout the process, the tree repeatedly appears as a timeless presence, with movement and breath, which exists beside and despite the human drama and pain.