Your kid could not do this - Max Freund Solo Show

About

Your kid could not do this is the title we ambitiously borrowed from the essay written in 1994 by curator Kirk Varnedoe on the occasion of Cy Twombly’s retrospective at MOMA in New York, because it defends with sharp irony that “child-like” aspect that we also nd in Max Freund’s work.
Max is in fact an adult who has preserved that instinctive and free attitude that we nd in his works and that is typical of children, giving the viewer the chance to reactivate momentarily that (apparently) illogical logic that we all had as children.

As curator I invite you to challenge your mind by observing “Table” for example, a work with a brutally unusual logic for adults. With this work Max goes beyond the traditional pictorial representation of an object on canvas, and uses canvas as a material to create a table-shaped object.
He gives reality to the representation, assuming that a table-shaped object (in a childish two-dimensional perspective) is a table itself.

And then he sets it up. And he hangs it on the wall like a painting.

This is his challenge. To break the rules of mental conventions and establish new ones.

Your kid could not do this, here’s the point: Max has the freedom of thought, the spontaneity, the playful attitude of a child but at the same time he elaborates the works with full awareness. Nothing is random.

In the same way his vocabulary of signs is apparently childish because his graphic gesture is fast, simple because it is spontaneous and instinctive, an impulse to exteriorize. But the overall poetics is articulated in complex compositions similar to a rebus of images to be decoded, as if Max would be testing us.

The combination of these two fundamental aspects of his work, the use of fabrics to build patchwork on which to paint, and the graphic gestures that like a thread hold together the previous textile composition, make his poetics clear and recognizable.

The common desire of the gallery and the artist is to propose to the public a playful approach to the exhibition, inviting visitors not only to observe the works with a judgemental attitude, but also to actively confront themself in rst person. For this reason we have prepared a table with sheets and colours where adults and children can have fun drawing, putting themselves at stake.

Furthermore an artist book with 40 coloured drawings will be published in a low edition in the course of the exhibition. It includes blank pages next to Max’s drawings and invites the reader to engage.

Max Freund (b.1992), is an artist who lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
After graduating in 2017 from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, he has participated in various international exhibitions and in of cial institutions such as the Hochhaus Herrengasse and the Museumsquartiert Q21 in Vienna. In 2018 he was selected by the prestigious Delphian Gallery in London as one of the emerging talents to be mentioned and in 2019 he participated in a group exhibition in their London exhibition spaces. In 2020 he will have two solo exhibitions: one at the Kunstverein Wolfenbüttel Foundation in Germany and another at WUK Vienna.
Max is also part of the micro - publishing house and artist collective Soybot in Vienna, focused on the production of artists’ zines and prints in various printing techniques.