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Since childhood, Max has used forms from nature, including the human body, to expose the rough edges and deep mysteries of human experience. Taken as a whole, his work displays a delirious inventiveness and frenetic experimentation.
His student work was confined by classical training to a series of oil portraits and figure studies from models, but this training also gave him an innate familiarity with anatomy and representational skills which enabled him to break free and create expressive figures spontaneously from imagination. Whereas in youth, he strove for technical virtuosity and precision, in maturity he has returned to the spontaneity and looseness of childhood.
His mature work began more than 30 years ago in the tradition of Goya, Picasso and Francis Bacon, with figurative paintings and drawings using distortion to achieve emotional power. Some of his early drawings from that period also presaged the irreverent, hallucinatory compositions of George Condo and lowbrow artists like Todd Schorr.
Impatient to experiment, he switched from painting to drawing on canvas, then moved exclusively to paper, and his style evolved more rapidly and ranged widely. Like street artists from Keith Haring to Shepard Fairey, he uses stylized elements and abstracted figures as signifiers in a visual language. And like Henri Michaux and other surrealist or visionary artists, he often improvises on natural forms, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, in enigmatic, dreamlike ways.
Many of his works on paper have been created as elements in an ongoing visual dialog, so that they can be viewed either individually, as series, or in montage.
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New Works on Paper: Ink
Works on Paper: Charcoal & Graphite
Works on Paper: Pastel
Works on Canvas
Installation & Performance
Photography
Student Work
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