“I push paint, I scratch paint, I swipe. I want the paintings to have a sense of rhythm, physicality and energy. I want the paintings to feel alive.”
Max Wade’s paintings are built through negative space around formal elements taken from his day-to-day life and travels. His works are autobiographical, beginning from his sketchbooks. The drawings start as mundane observations, often focusing on “spaces in between” rather than on an object itself. While the original marks are garnered directly from drawings of his everyday environment, through his painting process Wade reduces these sketches to their critical forms and their negative space. Wade scales them up, simplifies the motifs, rotates, and distorts them, allowing the works to depict a layered, imagined landscape where plains interchange and motifs are obscured. Wade consciously stives for ambiguity. He works to create paintings that ask questions of the viewers, striking up a conversation, rather than attempting to give answers.
Often taking on a large scale, Wade’s process invokes the physical style of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and contemporaries like Rose Wylie. Wade’s practice of addition and subtraction is intuitive, sometimes unfolding over months and years. The physicality of the painting process, especially at a large scale, is central to the abstraction in Wade’s paintings. In Wade’s work, the vestigial movement, rhythm, and energy are ever-present and lend to dynamic, expressive works. Wade explores the performative quality this scale adopts with the viewer. “I push paint, I scratch paint, I swipe. I want the paintings to have a sense of rhythm, physicality and energy. I want the paintings to feel alive.”
Wade’s use of bright and saturated colors contributes to his works’ undeniable joyous, emphatic quality. These works are defined by the tension between these colors and subjects as much as they are characterized by their vivid tonality. Wade’s brush strokes develop a textural presence as they seem to sweep across the physical surface of the things they reproduce, similarly in tension with the scenes’ imagined quality. It’s a tension that isn’t so much resolved as channeled, by means of repetition, adaptation and restatement, into a rewarding vitality.
Max Wade was born in 1985 in London. Wade studied Fine Art Painting at Brighton University. Wade’s recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Go Bang’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, UK 'Whisper Down the Lane', Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2021; ‘Sowing the Soil with Salt’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2020; ‘Platform: London’, hosted by David Zwirner (online), 2020; ‘ Wind for the Sails’, Messums Wiltshire, Salisbury, 2020; ‘Between the Dog and the Wolf’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2019; ‘For Tina’, curated by Roxie Warder hosted at Cob Gallery, London, 2019. Recent group exhibitions have included ‘Abstract Colour’, Marlborough Gallery, 2023. ’Stand with Ukraine', Hales London, 2022. His residencies include Artist’s workshop & exchange, Muscat, Oman, Muscat, Gasworks gallery & Triangle network 2013. Wade lives and works in London.