JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY is pleased to present Dodge and Burn, a solo exhibition of paintings by British artist Max Wade, on view at the gallery's downtown location from September 20th through November 3rd, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 20th, from 5 to 7pm. All are welcome.
Dodge and Burn, Wade’s first solo exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery and in the US, presents twelve oil paintings which further expand on his autobiographical painting practice and demonstrate his growing interest in technique and materiality. Rooted in representation, Wade’s paintings are imagined landscapes in flux, where forms emerge and dissolve within fields of color and texture, resisting objective interpretation. Titled after the analog photography technique of “dodging and burning,” which is used during the darkroom process to physically manipulate the exposure of subjects separate from their environment in photographic prints, Dodge and Burn nods to Wade’s painting process. In his practice in which planes interchange and motifs are obscured, Wade has his own physical process of manipulation and interruption as he applies and removes paint to create depth, texture, and a sense of ambiguity that invites the viewer into an ever-evolving dialogue with the work.
Wade consciously strives for ambiguity in his works. 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, which are both a conscious exercise and a tool for his practice. These drawings are airy networks of relations, shapes cast by suspended encounters, rather than detailed documentation of Wade’s day-to-day life. From these representational drawings, Wade gathers new forms and spatial relations to work from. After further exploring and synthesizing these forms through further drawing and repetition, 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. These pieces unfold over months and even years, as with Steeplechase (2020-2024).
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 use of a bright, saturated palette contributes to his works’ undeniable joyous, emphatic quality. Their compositions 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. Each work’s rhythm and mood are largely set by music, another tool central to Wade’s practice. A combination of styles and genres, from frantic jazz to repetitive minimalist compositions, this music paces and invigorates the physicality of Wade’s 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 ‘Abstract Colour’, Marlborough Gallery, 2023. ’Stand with Ukraine', Hales London, 2022. His residencies include Artist’s Workshop & Exchange, Muscat, Oman in 2013. Wade lives and works in London.
