For Brooklyn-based artist Maayan Zilberman, jewel-like sugar creations—shaped like caviar or stilettos—tap into collective desire.
On a recent morning at Maayan Zilberman’s studio in Dumbo, a neoclassical sculpture basks in the light streaming through the north-facing windows. Headless like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, armless like the Venus de Milo, the foam-and-plaster model looks as if it’s made of stiff white frosting— understandable for an artist whose most recognizable medium is sugar.
For the past decade, Zilberman, a fashion-world émigré, has produced stylized confections under the name Sweet Saba. Her candy cassette tapes, slipped into plastic cases, animated a residency at the Standard High Line Hotel. For the beauty brand La Prairie, she assembled caviar-like spheres into cocktail rings. When the Met Gala celebrated the Costume Institute’s exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” guests took home Zilberman’s champagne-flavored rosaries flecked with edible gold—a sacrament inspired by Saint Versace himself.
Her evolving sculpture practice is both a departure and not. The Venus figure, which a fabricator is rendering in limestone for its future life as a fountain, is heading shortly to a secluded island in the Caribbean, where it will be the centerpiece of a commissioned Sweet Saba pop-up gallery this December.
“I wasn’t planning on sending her away yet because I’m still conceptualizing this new body of work—all antiquities from memory,” Zilberman says, recalling childhood visits to ancient ruins. Eventually, she envisions a roomful of fountains, but for now this one will hold court alone, oozing a jewel-toned oil meant to resemble molten sugar. As a kid, she used to wonder what went on within those marble statues. “Do they have inner workings? A life force of any kind?” she says. Gushers, the liquid-filled candy from the 1990s, springs to mind. “Literally—that’s not even a joke,” Zilberman replies, her smile rimmed in raspberry lipstick. “There’s a direct connection to all of that.”
Zilberman, who grew up in Israel and Canada, moved to Manhattan at 16 for art school. Her first shared apartment in Alphabet City fell apart before it began, when she returned home to learn that the lease holder had double-rented the room. “I think I’d been at Palladium that night in hot pants and a pink sequin tube top,” she recalls. Nightlife became a creative outlet, a chance to trot out experimental outfits and self-styled hair. “I’d cut it to look like it was a wonky wig, like Blondie,” says the artist, now 46 with a sleek silver ponytail.
An interest in perception shaped her early work. For a thesis project, she used humidifier devices to pump out a peculiar scented cloud. “I wanted people to walk through the very, very small space of when you’re sick in bed and drinking ginger ale and you can feel the bubbles going through your nose,” she says. Another installation atomized 50 gallons of mouthwash through ornately carved wood vents, to the point that the walls turned a sticky pale green and the spearmint air stung visitors’ eyes. “I can’t even believe I just accessed that,” Zilberman says of the detour to her college work. The impulse to shape experience through sensory interventions became a through line.
In 2007, she cofounded a lingerie label, The Lake & Stars, named after a Victorian euphemism for all-out prowess in bed. The line was an industry darling—all the right champions and stockists and press—but by 2013 she wound down the business, craving a return to art. The defining spark of inspiration arrived in a resurfaced childhood dream. In it, she buried all her trinkets in the garden, only to discover that they’d turned to candy.
Sugar proved to be a “magical medium,” she says. It was self-contained enough for a home studio, unlike other sculptural or ceramic practices. And sugar shared a quality with a jeweler’s precious metals: “You could always melt it down and do something else,” she says. “There’s a constant regeneration and rebirth with the work.”
Food is a ripe subject for artists to interrogate. It’s a pleasure center in Marilyn Minter’s Food Porn paintings (1989-1990) and a system of injustice in Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, mounted in 2014 at Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory. Floor Cone (1962), a soft sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, translates ice cream into plush geometry.
For Zilberman, food itself was less the draw, having grown up in a family largely without mealtime rituals, in an era marked by fad diets. “But sugar—no matter what it is and where you are in the world, it’s fascinating to people,” she says. We are hard-wired to smile and swoon.
Creative touchpoints litter Zilberman’s studio. She rifles through a 1987 cookbook called Candymaking, with recipes for cordial fruits and cream cheese mints. “Look at this insane photo of a chocolate-covered hand!” she trills with delight. Another vintage book, Brazil: Paradise of Gemstones, prompted her to make sugar replicas of crystals. Both feature hand models with impeccable cherry manicures, exactly like Zilberman’s own. Talk of high-gloss red brings up her love of race cars. “I think of them as extremely feminine art forms and very sexy,” she says, explaining how each piece at the Ferrari factory is individually sandcast and sculpted. “It’s actually what informed how I make my molds.”
She gestures to the fanciful baubles on nearby trays. Some are sugar “estate jewels,” like the ones she offered Walton Goggins and Olivia Rodrigo at HBO Max’s Emmys party earlier this fall. Another is a replica of Empress Eugénie’s diamond-encrusted bow—a spoil of the recent Louvre heist.
Dress: Emily Dawn Long, Missing Louvre Necklace: Maayan
“Everyone is so obsessed with what happened to the pieces: Did they melt them down? Did they chop them up?” says Zilberman, who conjured her own replacement, as if through a kind of transubstantiation. In fact, she used to have people send in their treasured objects, and she’d make edible replicas as a means of loosening their sentimentality. “I like to let things go,” she says.
There’s an off-kilter freedom in Zilberman’s pageantry. She waves off any suggestion of real refinement: “That is actually smoke and mirrors,” she says. “I love the idea of polish.” The idea of food is also how she imagines her work, never mind that she has collaborated with a food technologist to devise palatable candy flavors, ranging from guava to bacon. “I don’t care about recipes or seeing people make food,” she says, shrugging off the how of tutorial culture. “I think that’s why I like art so much—because it’s an obvious question, to ask why.”
For Zilberman, the why is steeped in fizzy celebration, whether she’s reinventing gems or devising costumes with her 6-year-old daughter, Freddie, for the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. It’s also tethered to the rapturous power of desire. On her desk, there’s a pile of textile swatches for her Caribbean installation, and she’s homing in on faux crocodile and latex for the jewel-box interiors—a subversion of the expected island textures.
“My fantasy is that you enter this space and are transported into a totally other world,” says the artist, who will lead a series of activations at the weeklong gallery. “It’s very much like a jewelry store—very serene.” As for the wares? “Oh, there’s nothing for sale,” she says. It’s the idea of a store, and shoppers are in for a treat.
