Maximilian Rödel “Phantom Skies”

Carvalho Park

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CARVALHO PARK presents Maximilian Rödel’s solo exhibition, Phantom Skies, marking the Berlin-based artist’s first Stateside solo show, and his second exhibition with the gallery.

A luminous, resonant hymn moves through the space. The chromatic shifts of Rödel’s immense and impalpable paintings open an extraordinary window into unbounded space, transcending physicality with resonances poetic and mythic. Subsuming, pulsing color plays out like live theatre; the players, standing like sentries, enveloping viewers into their world. Amongst an assembly of towering works, two paintings measuring a mere 50 x 40 cm even act as enigmatic portals.

Held in a hypnotic state of tension, the paintings hover in a seductive state of intrinsic dichotomies: intimate and sublime, power and vulnerability, before and after. Titles such as Prehistoric Sunset suggest a time unexperienced, while other paintings murmur of a serene utopia, a kind of imagined aftermath. Of these fundamental polarities, there is also the spiritual versus personal engagement, mirroring a spectrum of innate human experience. In this turbulent contemporary moment, we seek the universal, connectivity, a shared way to understand. Beauty aside, these paintings have the ability to stir within oneself all that is human. These works are undoubtedly, formally, as much about feeling as they are about painting, and through their eternal tussle, the artist offers a reflection of our condition.

Fields of floating color, this new suite of works is a treatise on immateriality and an affirmation on the power of color. In the painting Prehistoric Sunset M I (2022), glowing violet radiates through a black veil, giving fullness to void as an unsuppressed luminosity breaks through. It is Rödel’s handling of color that unbinds and opens the picture plane. Spellbinding passages of color are without beginning or end. Ambiguous transitions of tonalities – a cloud of rose that develops to plum gray or wisps of pale yellow that coalesce with faint green – dissolve the paintings’ surfaces. Rödel’s vaporous clouds are at times defined by visible brushstrokes, subtly reminding us of the artist’s hand, and momentarily, anchoring the work back in the physical world.

Maximilian Rödel (b. 1984) is a Berlin-based artist whose work has been the subject of two institutional solo exhibitions: Celestial Artefacts (2021) at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, and Story of the Forgotten Light (2022) at Kunstverein Arnsberg.
Solo gallery exhibitions include those held at Carvalho Park, New York (2022); Martina Tauber Fine Art, Munich (2022, forthcoming); Kanya Kage, Berlin (2021); Fiebach, Minniger, Cologne (2019, 2017, 2014, 2013, 2010); Studio Picknick, Berlin (2018). Significant group exhibitions include those held at Galerie Zeller van Almsick, Wien, Österreich (2021); Mountains Galerie, Berlin (2020); Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin (2020); Carvalho Park, New York (2019); Reiter Galerie, Leipzig (2019); Fiebach, Minniger, Cologne (2016, 2015, 2013, 2011); Kunstverein Hannover (2013); Freies Museum, Berlin (2011); Kunstverein Weiden (2010); and Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (2010).
Rödel was a master student of Robert Lucander (2011), following his studies in Fine Art at the University of Fine Arts Berlin (2008), and undergraduate studies at University of Arts Braunschweig (2005).
CARVALHO PARK (est. 2019)

Visually distinctive programming features emerging artists reconsidering the distinctions between disciplines and expanding the language of form. The gallery is drawn to work that engages as physically as it does visually. A synthesis of the directors’ backgrounds in architecture and the performing arts, exhibitions work to activate the viewer’s environment and to shift context and categorization, allowing objects to move freely in and across the art and design landscapes.
Co-founded by Jennifer Carvalho + Se Yoon Park