Max Brenner often works with techniques from printmaking, screenprinting or gravure printing. He is constantly looking for new approaches and techniques. He wants to go beyond tried-and-tested approaches, he does not want to get stuck in habitual ways. He draws figurative, photorealistic, alienated and sometimes mixes his works with abstract painting. So he creates strong contrasts, bright, flickering colors, with rhythm, depth and multiple dimensionality. Viewers can be drawn into mostly detailed and complex compositions, in often irritating, uncomfortable and mysterious narratives.
Brenner often deals with “alienation”. For him, this is an individual and a social condition, in which the relationships between people proceed according to rules that are unrecognized for them, thus preventing them from discovering their own needs and potentials. This sensation often leads Brenner to gloomy, threatening sci-fi scenarios.
In his series “shift” he confronts the sensory overload and disorientation during a subway ride. Crammed into the smallest space, passengers seem cramped, machine-like, unrelated, self-alienated, overwhelmed. Individuals and impressions merge into an abstract-minded, will-less mass.
Max Brenner, who grew up in South Tyrol, lives and works in Vienna. Even as a child, he began to paint and draw early. Since 2017 he studies at the University of Applied Arts in the Department of Printmaking (direction Jan Svennungsson).