Max Estenger: New Paintings Part II: Max Estenger
Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce Max Estenger: New Paintings Part II, an exhibition of new and recent works, following the artist's recent exhibition at the Steffany Martz Gallery in Manhattan, this is his first one-person exhibition with the gallery.
Building upon his inventive and independent painting oeuvre of over 30 years, Estenger’s artworks continue the structural complexity of that work and its attendant material emphasis while now also giving color an equal significance. The payoff is in the rich intensity of his color as it gives these paintings a palpable energy and pulse.
The supports are canvas, clear vinyl, stainless steel and wood strainers and each painting reveals itself in different ways—the physicality of the presentation grounds the viewer in the phenomenological present while his color achieves a new kind of simultaneous disembodiedness. There is a new tension created between facticity and feeling which lay at the heart of these paintings.
The viewer is literally invited into the paintings where a direct experience can be had by looking carefully at the work. Estenger shows how his objects are constructed, the manner in which they are painted, and the relationships they maintain to place. Surface, support, and surround join together to disclose a materialist vision, a critical worldview and an ethical dimension which when taken together, implicate clarity, transparency, and truth to materials within the parameters of an original artistic vision. His work highlights polarities such as hard/soft, opaque/transparent, painted/unpainted, matte/glossy, inside/outside, actual/virtual, and fragmented/whole among other things.
His paintings are a further clear statement of Estenger’s understanding of the abstract painting of the past as his iconoclastic practice grapples with Color Field, hard edge, monochrome, Minimalist, post-Minimalist, and Simulationist readings in an inspired meta-painting. His work has answered the bell each time as a riposte to the terminal endgame claims of the “last” painting.
Max Estenger was born in Los Angeles, California and received his M.F.A. in art from the University of California at San Diego in 1988 after receiving his B.A. in art from the California State University, Fullerton in 1986; and has been living and working in New York City since 1988. Recent career highlights include a 2016 survey with a fully illustrated catalogue at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, curated by Jocko Weyland. The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego recently acquired an important work from his seminal See Through Series (1991). His work has appeared in Artforum, FlashArt, The New York Times and the Washington Post.
A full-color catalogue with an essay by art historian and art critic Molly Warnock will be published to accompany this exhibition.
April 22, 2023 - June 15, 2023
Opening reception: Saturday, April 22th, 2023
4228 Howard Ave Kensington MD 20895
Open by appointment Tuesday – Saturday
Contact Luis Pazo:
(571) 315-5279
info@pazofineart.com
