Max Maslansky (b. 1976 ) has held solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, most recently at 12.26, Dallas, Marc Jancou, Rossiniere, Switzerland, Lefebvre et Fils, Paris, and Five Car Garage, Los Angeles. Maslansky has been featured in group exhibitions including "Made in L.A. 2014", at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; at Fredericks and Freiser, New York, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, and V1, Copenhagen. His first monograph, "Used Paintings", including essays by Laura Kipnis and Michael Ned Holte, was published by Not a Cult Press in 2018. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
For the last few years Maslansky has been working increasingly with clay, probing a path away from his previously known 'porno paintings' towards an abiding fascination with sea creatures, from crabs to octopus, from fish to water fowl. Meditating on expressions of interiority, masculinity, and shame, Maslansky attempts to live vicariously through animals of the deep and those who pry into it from above which, in turn, 'masquerade' as traditional ceremonial vessels “to discover himself anew". Often a symbol of the unconscious, the abyssal depths of the sea serve Maslansky as an idealized stage of the 'imago', from which his previously unconscious forms emerge distilled and inflamed.
Maslansky's porno paintings were based on vintage pornographic images. He used individual photos as templates for new compositions, which often depart radically from their source. Painted on used bedsheets and pillow cases found in thrift stores—whose psychic residue of past owners have an indirect influence—Maslansky turns a playful eye on material created for banal, yet passionate consumption. Heavily invested in the phenomena of color interaction in painted space, Maslansky highlights how its effects can not only hide and reveal the mechanics of pornography, but delay general apprehension in the visual field.
For the last few years Maslansky has been working increasingly with clay, probing a path away from his previously known 'porno paintings' towards an abiding fascination with sea creatures, from crabs to octopus, from fish to water fowl. Meditating on expressions of interiority, masculinity, and shame, Maslansky attempts to live vicariously through animals of the deep and those who pry into it from above which, in turn, 'masquerade' as traditional ceremonial vessels “to discover himself anew". Often a symbol of the unconscious, the abyssal depths of the sea serve Maslansky as an idealized stage of the 'imago', from which his previously unconscious forms emerge distilled and inflamed.
Maslansky's porno paintings were based on vintage pornographic images. He used individual photos as templates for new compositions, which often depart radically from their source. Painted on used bedsheets and pillow cases found in thrift stores—whose psychic residue of past owners have an indirect influence—Maslansky turns a playful eye on material created for banal, yet passionate consumption. Heavily invested in the phenomena of color interaction in painted space, Maslansky highlights how its effects can not only hide and reveal the mechanics of pornography, but delay general apprehension in the visual field.