Gabriel .A. Maher Studio

Gabriel A. Maher Studio makes research-driven work across image, object, space, film and text. The studio's projects work with how design and media systems organise what we see, how we move, and what feels possible or inevitable.

Gabriel Maher (they/them) is an interdisciplinary designer known for work that deals directly with the effects of design and the act of designing. They begin with specific designed objects and systems: from the intimate scale of a design magazine, to a digital media platform, or the infrastructural scale of a digital advertising network. They deconstruct how they are designed, how they operate, what logics drive them, and how they move through and organise space. This is a hands-on process, working directly with the visual and sensory force of these designed systems, cutting into their images, text, spatial arrangements, and sequences.

Their deconstructions reveal how media and the designed systems that distribute it position and orient bodies, direct movement, and shape what we encounter in everyday environments.

Maher's response is to take the same deconstructed material and re-stage it. Working across surfaces, screens and projection, they assemble provocative and fragmented montages of image and text, and construct symbolic objects, spatial configurations and 1:1 scale models from media-connected materials (urban glass, frames, interfaces) that disorient and reorient the body in space. Their work brings audiences into direct and intimate aesthetic contact with media and design logics, so that orientation, attention, and the positioning of the body become felt. Their work finds the points where these systems can be interrupted, slowed down or reoriented.

Since 2024, they are a PhD researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA, University of Amsterdam), where their current body of work, Cities on Loop, deconstructs the algorithmic culture of digital media infrastructures in urban space. Most recently their work has received a Research Priority Area (RPA) Global Digital Cultures (GDC) Grant.

Maher's creative and research outputs have been presented at the Serpentine Galleries, Whitechapel Gallery and Design Museum London, MAD Museum (New York), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), Vitra Design Museum, Milan Salone del Mobile and Het Nieuwe Instituut among others. Their work is recognised with international grants and awards, including the IphiGenia Gender Design Award, the Hublot Design Prize shortlist, Keep an Eye and Gijs Bakker awards, as well as support from Stimuleringsfonds and international residencies such as Iaspis.

For the past two decades, Maher has taught and lectured across art and design institutions internationally, including the University of NSW Faculty of the Built Environment, RMIT School of Design, Sandberg Institute, Royal Academy of Art in the Hague and Design Academy Eindhoven. Their pedagogic methods, grounded in critical response processes and peer-to-peer approaches, support young designers and artists in finding their own voice and agency within creative processes. They currently teach at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Studio

Studio 2.06
de Wittenplaats
De Wittenstraat 27
1052 AK Amsterdam

gabriel@gabrielmaher.xyz

CV