Artist
Maxim Brandt
Born 1986 in Ukraine, lives and works in Berlin
Maxim Brandt paints surreal, dreamlike scenes in acrylic and oil, assembling mundane subjects and disparate elements into compositions he compares to theatre sets or verses of poetry. He often starts from a base image that acts as a stage and completes it with cut-out elements, a collage method that carries through into the layered, multi-level spaces of the paintings, with colour, light and composition shifting as he works. Recurring motifs act like captions that pull each scene together: a liquid smiley face hovering over a landscape, industrial machinery, skeletons and vanitas still lifes. Brandt draws on Eastern European folklore, the fairy tales of his childhood and the surrealist tradition to build worlds that are calm and absurd at once, where technology and nature converge.
