YEARS OF RIVER AND OF SUN, OF SAND, THE WIND AND THE SKY
selected recent paintings by Max Berry. Courtesy of China Heights Gallery and their on-going offsite at Louis Vuitton Brisbane.
Berry, who was born in 1987 in Katherine, NT, currently lives and works in Sunshine Coast QLD he has been exhibiting his work since 2011.
Using photographs and images from film and other media, he tackles a breadth of subjects and motifs, including landscape, figures, the mythic and seemingly banal everyday objects and their environments. The resulting paintings suggest an allegorical atmosphere and posses poetic power.
The process of finding and transforming the images is in the manner of a collector, amassing libraries of material that is not necessarily understood yet intrigues or engages. These are worked through in various stages before reaching the canvas, where he makes the final piece in oils relatively quickly and in some instances in a single session.
The resulting pictures work together to create a place, where motifs can be symbolic, obscured or warped. this way, they express the slipperiness of representation through painting and the inherent subjective nature of experience and memories.
Berry’s seemingly understated works combine to prompt careful contemplation.