Max Maddox is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges from public performance to abstract painting, a compass he has used to approach subjects such as class struggle, public hysteria, marginalization, and phenomenology. Maddox received a B.A. in Philosophy from Grinnell College, a discipline he integrates with his training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art to pursue cultural critique through art. He has exhbited across the United States, he was a resident artist at Redline Contemporary Art Center from 2020-=2022, and is a 2023 Greene Fellow. Contact him at maxmaddoxart@gmail.com.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“My commitment to drawing stands out to me, a practice I have returned to again and again throughout my life. The practice is about investigation and discovery, a willingness to fail, to erase, to start over. Drawing is a kind of “making plans,” always seeming to encourage something more, beyond its limits, a discipline that anticipates “moving on” to something else. While wanting to remain in drawing’s orbit, it is not quite an end in itself; it slings me again and again into other art forms.
Illness has so colored my perceptions of myself, of nature, and of my fellow human beings that it has become the lens through which I look at the world. Illness has made my outlook unconventional, and for this reason I am a cultural critic, adopting the philosopher's doubt into my practice. This doubt has characterized my perspective on art, society, as well as my own experiences, so I am rightfully called a skeptic.
And so drawing has been my dearest friend in this journey, bringing me back to the pencil, the cat, the stove, to a room where anything can be challenged, crumpled up, and burned in favor of a fresh start, a newness I have come to treasure above all else.
