Maxwell Dunlop | Paradox Reality

Maxwell Dunlop creates ambiences of peculiar gravity, spaces which narrate with suspension in the one hand and reveal a wide, calm timelessness on the other hand. Dunlop’s interiors depict sumptuous halls and prestigious foyers of a bygone, “classical” era. While these interiors are thoroughly marked by civilizational design and history, they still seem strangely large, deserted, and dark, as if after their inhabitants had moved out. Human artefacts are placed here in distant perspective, like visiting a museum out of hours.

 

He describes it in his own words:„Representational painting is often seen as an inherent contradiction. The four dimensions of reality are expressed within the two dimensions of the picture plane. A brush stroke presents itself to the viewer as a simultaneous paradox, a pure physically flat material, andan illusion of some external reality. However, human perception of reality is much more inline with the act of painting than we previously believed because our mental models of existence are contradictory fabrications themselves. The physical reality of the universe is far too complex for us to experience. There is too much data for the human brain to perceive or process, yet our mental models of reality are more than just data compressions of base reality. Our models are subjective, fluid, biased, unique, and flawed. My work investigates and amplifies the multiple layers of contradictions that make up the human experience. The spaces in these paintings were constructed using a mixture of references from art history, human history, memory, and direct observation.

 

My paintings are symbols that represent and challenge the substructure of our broader cultural and historical environment. They are real and imagined, they exist in the past and the present, and they criticize the history that they represent Primarily though, these are paintings. They exist where abstraction and representation vibrate against each other, and the viewer can project their own subjective experiences into the ambiguity of the paint.“

 

Maxwell Dunlop, born in 1983, grew up on the East Coast of the USA in southern New England as the son of a renowned painter. He studied painting at the Art Institute of Boston from 2001 to 2005, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Dunlop lives in Germany and in the USA. His paintings are represented in collections internationally.