Cob Gallery company logo
Cob Gallery
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Home
  • Artists
  • Exhibitions
  • Fairs
  • News
  • Editions
  • Publications
  • info
  • Viewing Room
  • Residency
Cart
0 items £
Checkout

Item added to cart

View cart & checkout
Continue shopping
Menu
  • Current
  • Forthcoming
  • Past
  • Online

For Tina: Max Wade

Past exhibition
7 February - 16 March 2019 Gallery Exhibitions
  • Overview
  • Works
  • Installation Views
  • Press
  • Text
For Tina, Max Wade
View works
Share
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email

Cob Gallery is proud to present For Tina, an exhibition of large-scale abstract paintings and woodcuts by artist Max Wade, curated by Roxie Warder.

 

Produced over the past three years, the works on display in For Tina are based on sketch-book drawings made from direct observation of everyday objects and scenes. Scaled up, simplified, processed and adapted, these drawings are reduced to their critical forms and transformed into something new. Negative space is reversed and becomes positive, is coated with new layers of paint and asserts its own presence. Plates on a dresser become fins, or sails; the act of repetition transmutes them into pure form.

 

Wade’s practice of abstraction produces scenes whose near-recognisability starts an imaginative dialogue with the viewer, suggesting the memory of some half-forgotten place or experience. Traces of something tangible remain as tantalising footholds or prompts: daubs of primary colour interact like the ligatures of some unknown script; figures appear in conversation, the silhouette of one becoming the shoulder or neck of another. Blocks of black and white interact like screens or masks, forming shelves of depth whose gaps and fissures allow the artist’s intuitive process of abstraction and subtraction, sometimes extended over months or even years, to reveal itself to the attentive observer.

 

The physicality of working at a large scale is central to the abstraction in these paintings, which nod to the work of artists like Willem de Kooning and Rose Wylie while asserting their own idiosyncratic energy. Wade’s brush strokes develop a textural presence as they seem to sweep across the physical surface of the things they reproduce, in tension with the scenes’ imagined quality. It’s a tension that isn’t so much resolved as channelled, by means of repetition, adaptation and restatement, into a rewarding vitality.

Related artist

  • Max Wade

    Max Wade

Share
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email
Back to Past exhibitions
Privacy Policy
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2022 Cob Gallery
Site by Artlogic
Go
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Artsy, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
Send an email
View on Google Maps

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences
Close

Join our mailing list

Signup

We will process the personal data you have supplied to communicate with you in accordance with our Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails.