Aaron Garber-Maikovska

Aaron Garber-Maikovska was born in 1978 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Berkeley, California. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000, working with Doug Hall in painting and new genres, though no source documents a completed degree there. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006, studying with Paul McCarthy. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

His practice spans painting, drawing, video, performance, and installation, and is grounded in a highly physical, often full-body approach to mark-making, frequently worked out on large sheets of archival gator board. His first solo exhibition, Counter Moves, was held in 2012 at Greene Exhibitions in Los Angeles. Museum-level attention followed relatively quickly: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has shown and discussed his work, and institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Walker Art Center, Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Long Museum in Shanghai, and the Perez Art Museum Miami hold his work in their collections. Through the 2010s and 2020s he exhibited with galleries including Standard (Oslo), C L E A R I N G, Blum & Poe (now BLUM), and Massimo De Carlo, and in 2025 Timothy Taylor announced it would represent him, in collaboration with MASSIMODECARLO in Milan, with a solo exhibition planned for fall 2026.

Garber-Maikovska's work has drawn attention chiefly through institutional acquisition and gallery programming rather than a large body of accessible, quotable criticism. Wikipedia states that his work has been featured in and reviewed by The New York Times Magazine, Contemporary Art Review LA, Artforum, and Time Out Magazine, though the original review text was not available to verify verbatim. The recurring institutional framing, echoed by the Hirshhorn Museum's own account of his practice, treats his work as a physically driven, performative form of markmaking, in which drawing and painting function almost as documentation of bodily motion. Museums and galleries alike have emphasized the gap between the intensity of his process and the resolved, often vividly colored surfaces it produces.

Garber-Maikovska's auction history is real but still thin. The best documented result is Little Pearl (2020), which sold for USD 51,600 at a Phillips online sale in London that closed on 7 July 2026, more than four times its low estimate, according to market coverage of the sale. A single secondary source also cites earlier prices as high as USD 97,500 at Sotheby's New York and USD 87,500 at Phillips New York, but no work title, lot number, or sale date has been independently confirmed for either figure, so they are treated here as unverified context rather than confirmed benchmarks. Smaller works on archival gator board have sold at Phillips London for a few thousand pounds, including one at GBP 6,192 against a GBP 3,000 to 5,000 estimate. The spread between these results, from a few thousand pounds to tens of thousands of dollars, reflects a market still working out where his prices settle. His recent move to Timothy Taylor, paired with continuing gallery support from MASSIMODECARLO, is the clearest current signal of institutional and commercial momentum.

Garber-Maikovska's market is young, and any single price point, including his USD 51,600 auction high, should be read against a small and uneven sales history rather than as a stable benchmark. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification currently run through his representing galleries, now Timothy Taylor and MASSIMODECARLO. His steady run of museum acquisitions, at LACMA, the Hammer, the Hirshhorn, the Walker, and Fondation Louis Vuitton among others, is the strongest indicator of long-term institutional interest, while collectors should treat the wide spread between his lowest and highest recorded auction prices as a sign of a market still finding its footing.