Max Brand (German, b. 1982) paints with a wide variety of media including sidewalk chalk, crayon, pencil, marker, spray paint, ballpoint pen, chlorine bleach, and oil and acrylic paints. His chaotic lines, lush washes, and indeterminate stains create thickets of representational noise that are as exuberant as they are deceptively scatterbrained. The artist’s line quality, often similar to a doodle or illustration, is both idle and obsessive, serving for Brand as the raw material of the mind, as a transcription of the automatic or subconscious. Taken as a whole, his visions—drawn as much from cinema, ceramics, comic books, Japanese anime, and graphic design as from painting itself—hint at codes or constellations of thought.
Max Brand: no solid footing – (trained) duck fighting a crow is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director, MoMA PS1, and Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Jocelyn Miller, Curatorial Assistant, MoMA PS1.