Born in 1982 in Warsaw, she lives and works between New York and Düsseldorf, Germany. She is an MFA graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and recipient of a scholarship from the Escola Superior de Artes e Design (ESAD) in Porto, Portugal. In 2012, Maess was nominated to the Grand Prix at the FID Prize, Paris, and in 2013 she was shortlisted to the Strabag Artaward International in Vienna. Amongst others, she exhibited at the Plumba Contemporary Art Gallery, Porto; Residencia Corazón, La Plata, Buenos Aires; Museo dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome; in Poland, at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Program Gallery, The Starak Family Foundation, and Kasia Michalski Gallery in Warsaw, Galeria Miejska Arsenał in Poznań and BWA Sokól in Nowy Sącz.
Maess’s recent works examine organisms attacked by cancer. Using scientific material that involves cancer related databases, microscopic views, histopathology images, Kaplan-Meier curves, 2D and 3D modelling, the artist combines these visual facts about cancer into expressive images in order to create something meaningful and emotionally insightful. Of interest is both physiologic response but also mental outcome of such suffering. Specifically, how the disease changes the lives of patients and people closest to them (especially how the perception of time changes for a patient); how the body changes on a tissue level when affected by cancer, how the ground breaking oncology treatments change the way that cancer is perceived in culture.
Selected exhibitions
2019 Seing Sounds Feeling Freedom, Austrian Cultural Forum, Warsaw
2018 Nietota, Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Poland
2016 Small Works, Trestle Gallery, New York
2015 Abnormal Results, Platán Galériá, Budapest
2014 The Intuitionists, The Drawing Center, NewYork