Max Estenger “new paintings”

Norte Maar

This event has ended.

Norte Maar kicks off its fall season of programming with a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Max Estenger.

For the past three decades, Max Estenger has been developing new possibilities for abstraction. Utilizing a rigorous formal language as the driving force, his painted objects are involved in conversation with art history and the ongoing dialogue with the various parameters of abstract painting—formal, material and ideological. Estenger’s work brings together a visual clarity, integrity, and moral dimension with a tough-minded tenacity, fusing a serious study of direct experience with aesthetic gratification.

In this exhibition, Estenger continues his juxtaposition of disparate materials—raw canvas, stainless steel, clear vinyl and wood panels—to create multi-paneled works. The resulting interplay of surface, structure and color refine certain aspects of his practice while celebrating paint and color as never before in his work. Polarities such as hard/soft, opaque/transparent, painted/unpainted, matte/glossy, inside/outside, actual/virtual, etc. abound and become the content of the work.

“With this exhibition of new painting by Max Estenger,” explains Jason Andrew, Executive Director of Norte Maar, “we play forward our ongoing mission to promote the work by artists who challenge the way we see and experience the world. Like ‘the simple expression of complex thought,’ as the minimalist Donald Judd once said, Estenger takes on not only the compounding history of minimalism and hard-edge abstraction, but also its serialization and ubiquitous past. It’s ever so exciting to have such cutting edge painting being made right here in Cypress Hills.”

“I have always thought that abstraction was as epochal as Renaissance illusionism and if that tradition could last 500 years or so, abstraction could yield at least 200 years. We are in abstraction’s second century and I see no reason why interesting, fresh, and inventive work can’t still come from what started in 1912.”
–Max Estenger in conversation with Matthew Delegate

Max Estenger (b.1963) was born in Los Angeles, California and received his M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. He has been living and working in New York City since 1988. His most recent exhibition was a mid-career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson in 2016. A fully-illustrated 48 page catalogue was published on the occasion by MOCA Tucson with an essay by curator Jocko Weyland. Estenger lives in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.