Maja Kende, born in 1974 in Czechoslovakia, currently resides and works in Switzerland.

Maja Kende's artistic vision centers on the landscape while exploring the profound and the elemental. Her works transcend mere representation, uncovering the essence of terrains. Through her practices, she reimagines the landscape as a sacred space — a meeting point of land and sky, shadow and light — that echoes the primal rhythms of existence.

In her aquarels and charcoal works, Kende approaches the landscape through the lens of ritual and origin. Her aquarels are born from a meditative practice of repetition and precision: mix color, paint a stroke, dry — a cycle that distills the essence of land and sky into two horizontal lines. This disciplined process becomes a dialogue with simplicity and stillness. Meanwhile, her charcoal pieces evoke the primordial, using this most elemental of materials to conjure terrains steeped in raw, archetypal energy. The grainy textures and monochromatic tones speak to an ancient, almost tactile connection to the land, drawing the viewer into the primal origins of artistic creation.

Kende extends her exploration of landscapes into sculptural forms, which evoke an alchemical transformation, as she transmutes ordinary polystyrene balls, typically used in stuffed toys and bean bags, into dynamic landscapes of symbolic depth. Her reliefs, suspended between the earthly and the molecular, suggest terrains that are not merely physical but metaphysical—an interplay between land, sea, and the unseen architecture of existence itself. The intentionally reduced color palette evokes a primordial purity, inviting the viewer to encounter the sacred in simplicity. These works transcend the visible, pointing to the layers of reality that exist beyond immediate perception, awakening within us a resonance with the eternal, the elemental, and the uncharted spaces within both the cosmos and the soul.