Max Wade

Max Wade’s paintings are imagined landscapes in flux, where forms emerge and dissolve within fields of color and texture, resisting objective interpretation. Primarily working in oil, he cultivates paintings that ask questions of the viewers, striking up a conversation, rather than attempting to give answers Despite this ambiguity, his works remain firmly grounded in the real world. Wade pulls his subjects from his everyday life and travels, as he is drawn especially to overlooked spaces, with a sustained focus on the liminal areas in-between objects as he often builds forms from negative space rather than the subjects themselves. His process begins with his sketchbook drawings, airy networks of relations, shapes cast by suspended encounters, rather than detailed documentation of Wade’s day-to-day life. From these drawings, Wade gathers new forms and spatial relations to work from. Wade takes his harvest to large-scale canvases, first drawing with charcoal and then rapidly applying the oil in washes of pigment. As he pushes, pulls, scrapes and jabs his medium, most often layering wet paint on wet paint, his work blooms as he adds elements from other drawings to create a patchwork of distilled experience. Wade’s practice of addition and subtraction is intuitive as he works between many paintings at once, which unfold over months and often years.

Wade’s style is marked by sweeping, gestural brushstrokes indicative of his process-driven approach and his deep engagement with the act of painting itself. Often taking on a large scale, Wade invokes the physical style of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan, as well as contemporaries like Amy Sillman. Wade’s brushstrokes develop a textural presence as they dance across the physical surface of his canvas. Wade’s use of a bright and saturated palette contributes to his works’ undeniable joyous, emphatic quality. His works are defined by the lyrical tension between these colors, textures and suggested subjects. It is a tension that isn’t so much resolved as channeled, by means of repetition, adaptation and restatement, into a rewarding vitality. Wade is also concerned with the physicality of the painting process, especially at a large scale. The vestigial movement, rhythm, and energy are ever-present and lend to dynamic, expressive paintings which pulsate with life, inviting viewers into a space where lived experience and abstraction converge. Wade explores the performative quality scale adopts with the viewer. Each work’s pace and mood is largely set by music, another tool central to Wade’s practice. A combination of styles and genres, from frantic jazz to repetitive minimalist compositions, music paces and invigorates the physicality of his studio practice.

Max Wade was born in 1985 in London. Wade studied Fine Art Painting at Brighton University. Wade’s recent solo exhibitions include ‘Dodge and Burn’, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, USA; ‘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 ‘Across the Pond: Contemporary Painting in London’, curated by Emma Fineman, Eric Firestone Gallery, 2024; ‘Searching Minds’, Sid Motion Gallery, London; ‘New Abstractions’, Informality Gallery, Cromwell Place, London; ‘Abstract Colour’, Marlborough Gallery, 2023; and ‘Stand with Ukraine’, Hales Gallery, London. His residencies include Artist’s Workshop & Exchange, Muscat, Oman in 2013. Wade lives and works in London.