“I attempt to solve pictures for me, what emerges in the end, I never know. If I recognize something in the picture while painting that triggers a memory in me that I wasn't aware of before, it's finished. This exposed point reverses the painting into something objectively perceptible. My goal is to depict this inspiration as accurately as possible. I do not care what exactly is triggered, what matters is that a connection is created with the viewer.” – Maximilian Rödel
Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle invites Berlin-based artist Maximilian Rödel (*1984) to a solo exhibition as part of Various Others 2023. On display will be the painter's characteristic color-abstracted oil paintings, which in their potentiated atmospheric expression unfold a supra-temporal and -spatial validity. The color behaves diffusely on the canvas; it condenses, drapes itself like a nebulous veil over pictorial areas or at times develops a dazzling radiance. In Rödel's works, color itself is elevated to the central pictorial object, thus transcending its primordial function as a representational carrier medium. Boundary-dissolving, space-opening and immersive, allowing associations and yet intangible and adhering to the hidden, the compositions harbor a seemingly effortless complexity as well as multi-layeredness that prompts fundamental reflections on the Anthropocene.
In terms of art history, classically standing in the tradition of American Abstract Expressionism, as it sprouted especially in New York in the 1940s and 50s with its numerous subcurrents, the artist's canvas surfaces are treated as a field of vision without a central focal point. Specifically in the large-scale works, the color spaces seem to transcend the recipient's peripheral field of vision. The result is a transcendental act of viewing, which is characterized by both the immediacy of sensory experience and by the profound potential for contemplation that arises from it. In the sense of a large-scale and generous application of color as well as a careful compositional construction, which nevertheless follows an intuitive process of creation, clear parallels to Color Field Art become apparent. The increased formal reduction in turn shares essential pictorial arrangement strategies of the Minimal Art that emerged in the early 1960s. These characteristics stemming from the history of abstraction, are translated into highly contemporary and simultaneously supra-temporal paintings of glistening beauty and raw imagery.
Maximilian Rödel first studied at the HbK Braunschweig with Walter Dahn and Hartmut Neumann. This was followed by studies at the UdK Berlin with Thomas Zipp and Robert Lucander, which he completed in 2011 as a master student of the latter. Recent significant solo exhibitions include Carvalho Park, New York (2022); Kunstverein Arnsberg (2022); Martina Tauber Fine Art, Munich (2022); Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); Kunstverein Arnsberg (2021). Significant group exhibitions include Kunstverein Hannover (2013); Freies Museum, Berlin (2011); Kunstverein Weiden (2010); and the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (2010). Works by the artist will be presented at this year's KIAF Seoul, as well as in Hong Kong and are part of renowned international private collections.
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