Macha POYNDER

Macha Poynder was born in 1962 in Moscow. She has lived and worked in Paris since 1982. She has a degree from the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs (Paris).
Having begun drawing and painting at the age of six, she has never stopped. After spending almost fifteen years (both in Moscow and Paris) with her teachers who transferred to her and infused her with the knowledge, an eye, and roots, she is spending her life enriching them and stretching them through numerous voyages, nourished by traditions across various continents, cultures, and diverse movements, including abstract expressionism, in attempting to go beyond them, liberate herself from them and continue her personal exploration towards that which never ceases to open up, towards the very sources of painting.
With exhibits in New York, San Francisco, Paris, and London, her works are included in the collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou) in Paris, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the New York Public Library, the Rijksmuseum, as well as numerous private collections in the United States, France, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, Russia.

"My painting is becoming more and more like music. Instead of seeing it, I listen to it more and more, I hear it. Colors are also sounds, which any musician will tell you. If a color doesn't resonate, it is dead. The colors together form chords, which in turn creates a new resonance. Just like in music, in painting there exist rhythm and construction, tonalities and keys, an unusually complex musical fabric.
Regarding drawing and line, that is what guides you and leads you. It has become a dance more than ever. Pina Bausch or Merce Cunningham have demonstrated this, masterfully, wonderfully in their works. Letting the line dance is supreme happiness, as it is for a musician who lets sound dance or a dancer who draws with his body.
After more than forty years of activity I am arriving at a point, a threshold, where accumulated knoweldge finally leaves, where the body and what is beyond the body, where you know without request to thought (Richter said, in quoting Falk that "when you work a lot, the moment comes when the water starts to boil"), liberated from its control and domination. It turns into pure perception, when the link with the invisible, the unknown, and the infinite become clear, is freed and liberated from description. The painting can finally spring from its own source. A painting paints itself.
Many things thus become possible. The broadening of perception causes the visual field to broaden, so the more the territory of a painting grows larger, the more it extends our perception. And so on and so on, like a spiral with no end.
Painting is one of the instruments for penetrating even a minute part of the impenetrable mysteries of the world. Canvas, paper, surface are all a window where the visible and the invisible touch, come together, where the mystery is half open, and where the invisible is revealed." Macha Poynder