About:

Maia Luna Furchtenicht (b. 2002) is a visual artist working primarily in oil painting, printmaking, and ink. Following a peripatetic childhood between the US and Mexico, Maia began her artistic studies with a formal apprenticeship to the Oaxacan painter Ivonne Kennedy at the age of seventeen. She went on to study oil painting under the guidance of Maria Rosa Astorga, a chilean landscape painter, and Chinese ink with Mexican painter Raul Herrera.  In 2018 she joined the Guenda Collective, a group of international women artists working in Oaxaca, and has exhibited her work collectively at the Museum of Oaxacan Painters (2019, Oaxaca, Mexico); the Casa Migrante (2020, Amsterdam, Netherlands); and most recently at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (2024, CDMX). 

The dream-world is quintessential to Maia's work; her images show a magical world taken from dreams, personal histories, literary works, and travel.  Recurrent themes are alienation, rootlessness, deracinated spaces, and migration, experiences which underline her life as an expatriate in her adopted home of Oaxaca, Mexico. Her recent studies with Raul Herrera introduced her to ancient Japanese and Chinese painting techniques, transforming her work towards a lighter, more fluid, and highly gestural manipulation of the artists' materials. 

Currently, Maia resides in Oaxaca, Mexico.