Max Neumann German, b. 1949

Max Neumann (b. 1949) is one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary German figuration. He reduces the human figure to an abstract sign, distilling each composition to its essential forms. The faceless heads and bodies that recur throughout his work possess a powerful physical and psychological presence despite their sparse detail and their isolation in an indeterminate space. Neumann draws on memory and fragmentary, dreamlike recollection, distilling what remains into outline, shape, and shadow. At first glance, his paintings seem to promise narratives whose key has been lost. Yet they offer neither allegories nor parables to resolve their ambiguities; their force lies in what remains unexplained.

Born in Saarbrücken in 1949, Neumann studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe from 1970 to 1973 before continuing at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where he graduated in 1976 as a master student of Martin Engelmann. A DAAD scholarship took him to Paris in 1978 and 1979. His first solo exhibition, held in Berlin in 1980, brought immediate recognition. In 1987 and 1988, he returned to the Karlsruhe academy as a visiting professor.

Since the mid-1970s, Neumann has developed his images through a process of continual addition and erasure. He paints over forms and cuts back into them, allowing each image to emerge bearing the traces of its own making. His visual vocabulary draws on a wide range of sources, including picture magazines and newspapers, which he transforms into an unsettling personal repertoire. His figures and creatures resist conventional categories: imagined animals and human bodies whose anatomy has been distorted, displaced, or rendered strangely unfamiliar. Their deviations unsettle the viewer, while their stripped-down forms lend them the force of enigmatic emblems.

Neumann’s work has a particular affinity with literature, and writers have often found in his images a language of their own. Wolfgang Hilbig’s novel Ich features a Neumann painting on its cover. In 2010, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai responded to one of Neumann’s paintings of a black hound with a text. Neumann answered with fourteen further images, prompting another thirteen texts from Krasznahorkai. The exchange became Animalinside, published by Sylph Editions in its Cahiers series, in association with New Directions. The book introduced Neumann’s work to a wider English-speaking readership.

Since the late 1970s, Neumann has had more than 150 solo exhibitions worldwide, including presentations at Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Saarlandmuseum in Saarbrücken, the Centre d’Arts Plastiques in Royan, and the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels. His 2012 exhibition at Bruce Silverstein Gallery marked his first solo presentation in New York, followed by two further exhibitions, including Specter in 2018.