Sylvie Mayer is a painter from Rhode Island. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is a 2025 MFA Candidate at Boston University. Through layers of translucent washes that build to opacity, she creates paintings that consider intimacy, interiority and impermanence. Drawing from sources that span varied markers of time, her work evokes a sense of distance between past and present. Repetition and duplication play a role; she repaints, rehearses, and alters images, shifting tone and texture to consider new meanings.

Mayer’s paintings examine the mechanics of fiction – questioning the boundaries between reality and illusion, and considering the construction of personal and collective narratives. Informed by her childhood spent backstage as the daughter of a ballet dancer and teacher, she is interested in the dynamics of revelation and concealment in theatrical settings. Preoccupied by thresholds and in-between states, she depicts transitional spaces that mediate between public and private.

Interior scenes are a frequent subject of her paintings, imagined as spaces of suspended time, imbued with traces of their inhabitants. Mayer reflects on attachment, entanglement, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Suspended moments and hidden glimpses are altered through scale and perspective, converging to confront boundaries between the self and the external world.

Nationality: USA

Schools: Boston University, Boston, MA, USA