Max Presneill - Artists - Mark Moore Fine Art

Max Presneill (b. 1963, Britsh) is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles, originally from London, UK.

A painter with works that explore mortality, existential drive, class & political sub-texts, tribalism, sub-cultural iconography and masculine identity, he has exhibited throughout the world including Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, Istanbul, Sydney, Beijing, Tokyo and elsewhere, and is represented by Patrick Painter, Inc, as well as the Durden & Ray collective in Los Angeles. He is also represented by TW Fine Art in Brisbane, Australia, GCC Arte Contemporaneo in Merida, Mexico, The Farm & Distillery in Berlin and also works with ICFA in Beijing, Gallery Lara, Tokyo, S Gallery (LA and South Korea) and Shatto Gallery (LA). His work has also been shown at art fairs including The Armory Show (NYC), The Stray Show (Chicago), The Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Hong Kong Art Fair, Clavo Art Fair (Mexico City) the Los Angeles Art Show, Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm), QiPO (Mexico City) and Miami Projects (Miami) and in both the Yokohama Triennial and 13th Istanbul Biennial parallel events.

As a Curator he is currently the Director and Head Curator of the Torrance Art Museum, with particular curatorial interests in artist-led projects, emerging art, new models for curatorial methodologies and an international scope for partnerships, exchanges and building artistic communities. CBS Television named him in the top 8 Best Art Curators in Los Angeles (2015) and Modern Painters magazine included him in the 2018 Top 25 Curators to Watch from around the world, alongside colleagues from the Guggenheim, MOMA, Whitney, Tate, LACMA and other institutions. He is an Ambassador for the Artist-Run Alliance, based in Israel, as well as a member of a number of professional organizations, including the American Association of Art Curators, American Association of Museums, California Association of Museums and others. He has been honored by the City of Torrance for Excellence in Art on 2 occasions.

More recently he has developed and presented NOMAD (the largest pop-up exhibition in US history in 2021-current), and ULTRA! - a large scale public-art festival of contemporary art (2021), The ScandiLA exchanges (between artist-run spaces in Sweden and Los Angeles), and the B-LA-Connect series of exchanges between artist-run spaces in Berlin and Los Angeles (2019-22), and similarly, BLAM which links artist-run spaces in Berlin, Los Angeles and Mexico City. He is also currently the Curatorial Director of TRYST (the world’s largest international art fair for artist-run spaces, in Los Angeles). Over the course of his curatorial career he has curated more than 500 exhibitions, both in Los Angeles and worldwide, in Museums and commercial & alternative galleries, as well as occasional non-art locations.

Presneill has been a Professor of Art in both the UK and US, teaching at Undergraduate and Post-Graduate levels. His writings have been published in numerous publications and was also a contributing writer to the emerging artists section of FABRIK magazine for several years. He is the critical writer of over 50 artist and exhibition catalogs.

He is the Founder of Durden and Ray (2009 - current), a curatorial collaborative group for artists and a gallery in Los Angeles, as well as Founder and Curatorial Director of ARTRA Curatorial (2010-18), an independent, voluntary, curatorial projects management team which organized international exhibition exchanges and was responsible for the Co/Lab Art Fair for alternative spaces (2011 and 2012) and the MAS Attack events (huge 300+ artists pop-ups, 2015-18). Previously he was the Founder and Director of the alternative space, Raid Projects, an influential alternative gallery which had an international Artist-In-Residency program and monthly exhibitions (1998-2008) and the Director of Mark Moore Gallery, a successful and significant commercial gallery in Los Angeles (2005-8).

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My paintings are maps. They locate things within a space and form sets of relationships between things in the world. They are about the freedom to choose and decide, to create meaning by doing so, as an existential and political act.

They function as discursive formations between images, gestures, signs, symbols, in a fluid, contingent and multi-layered network of meanings and possible relationships. They incorporate, on the same picture plane, a mixture of historical reference, auto-biography and sub-cultural content in a shifting soup of knowledge, conjecture, opinion, guesswork, and the irrational. This interpenetration occurs when the histories of abstract mark making, an ongoing developing iconography and sub-cultural motifs are placed in relationships on the picture plane. The ‘arena’ of the picture plane (although implying one section of an infinite extension via hinted at grids), is a site of conflict for a merging of emotional states, conceptual ideas, memories and autobiography, where the notion of knowledge and understanding is contested. The connections between ‘events’ within that space create potential new relationships of meaning that accept uncertainty and the possibility of failure.

Disparate elements (of mark, motif, image and gesture) allow for a networking of possibilities, a web akin to the nature of the Mind, that reflect the problem-solving and pattern recognition search of our innate way of existing in the world. Any inherent cohesion is hermetic, oft times illogical, but is reformulated by the active participation of the mind viewing it. This is not an acceptance of the ’subjective’, as an all-is-acceptable interpretation, but rather a realism-based acknowledgment of the non-linear and cultural set of the brain’s ordering processes. They are built through an intuitive initial phase that is then 'modified' by formal concerns and the addition of these elements. My approach is somewhat akin to curating - selecting separate, disparate motifs and approaches and assembling on to the picture plane to form a new web of ideas. These aspects remain isolated and existential, although in a relationship with each other, expanding their potential and giving rise to complex structures of understanding, questioning and possibility . I incorporate elements from real life, in the form of badges, patches and photo transfer images onto the surface as a reference to existing sub-cultures and realities.

The paintings therefore exist as a set of questions and possibilities that offer up multiple avenues for non-didactic exchanges of potentialities. Within this structure autobiography sits side-by-side with political critique, art history ruminations alongside games of interpretation. Meaning is based on truth being diverse and conflicted, on strategies of associative connection and cultural structures that avoid essentializing contexts. This allows for an extended and negotiated dialogue between ideas of the political and class division, race, sub-cultural resistance and tribalism, via a curatorial-type selection and arrangement on the picture plane.

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