Max Geisler

Max Geisler’s installations are pictorial spaces made of color explosions and material collages that one can enter. Specifically created for the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the installation seems to be the result of an invisible force that, like a projectile, has flashed through the center of the architecture and blown it apart. We encounter the space as a freeze frame like the trace of a completed action.

Geisler builds a room inside the space. He conceives it as the material carrier of his painterly interventions. Beforehand, he precisely lays out the constructed architecture, adjusts it to the ongoing process, and then subjects it to a controlled act of destruction. From the frontal perspective, one is able to gaze into the depths through the succession of broken walls. The viewer can immerse themselves in the physically open space, so that by moving around new views of the image and color constellations emerge constantly.

Geisler has transferred his painting from the two-dimensional illusionistic image space to the real, three-dimensional one. He works with paint materials here, which he doesn’t mix any further. The layers of demolished walls and insulating material are an integral component of the pictorial composition. Even the mounted reinforcement grid creates a porous permeability in the paint application that has the visual quality of digital image interference. Because of the cracks and gaps in the walls, real and illusory perspectives merge together. Due to the large window facades, fragments of the installation become visible, even from the distance of the surrounding urban area. Conversely, in the exhibition space, the viewer sees the outside world as a visual set piece that penetrates through the fissures into the interior, whereby reality and artistic abstraction function as artistic fragments in equal measure.

(Text: Franziska Nori, Dennis Brzek)