Max Gottlieb

Max Gottlieb has worked as a film production designer for over thirty years interpreting films visually and the expertise with which he collaborates with constructors in realizing film productions.

Max creates abstract paintings with acrylic on canvas combining gestural marks with disciplined hard edge shapes and symbols. Using varied tools such as mops, large hand made rubber scrapers, pallet knives and squeegees Max explores organic and gestural marks. Contrasting these using masking tape and stencils with spray paint and brushes to form hard edges and more symbolic shapes, contrasting two different styles, organic versus plastic.

Colour is very vibrant in Max’s painting. A feature that has emerged from experience in film where sets can be lit to achieve striking vibrancy. Contrasting muted flat colour fields with textured bright and dayglo shapes. Researching and drawing on an ipad, combining photo ref 3D programs and drawing programs, Max develops ideas and imagery that are the backbone of ideas explored on canvas.

Colour combinations, current forms influenced by media and our online world, emogies, symbols, text abbreviations, iconography and the very nature of how we view the world largely from 2D devices. Many titles are based on these ideas. By utilising gestural mark making in contrast to precise graphic shapes and symbols Max explores the dicotomy between the analogue world and the digital, the physical and the virtual. Drawing on influences from Turners most abstract later paintings to computer imagery and pattern questions the process itself of how we communicate and what is knowledge.