Best known for his outstanding post-apocalyptic folk tales, Max Kauffman is an artist who doesn’t fear taking more risks or traveling the longer road to get to an idea for his work. A bit of a hodgepodge of things, Kauffman’s paintings shift deftly between abstraction and figuration by blurring the distinction between real and imagined, conscious and unconscious. The suggesting and exploding forms presented in his amazing body of work invite the observer’s own imaginative references and conjure the joyful mess of living.
Max’s pieces encompass a sense of
uncontrollable chaos and an almost folkloric approach to their subject matter.
He investigates how we draw comfort from inanimate objects and habitats that we occupy, letting them shape us.
Kauffman was born in 1981 in Chicago and grew up in South Bend,IN. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics, with a minor in
Anthropology from Arizona State University in 2004. He has participated in many solo and group
shows across the United States as well as Italy, Canada and Israel. His work has been featured in
publications like Boom,Vice, Beautiful Decay, Its Nice That, and Supersonic Electronic, to
name a few. Max has collaborated with Mountain Dew, Nike, and Arbor on projects, and has written
for Hi Fructose on and off since 2008. He currently lives in Denver with his cat daughter, Lady Drew.