Max Reubel

Max Reubel is a German artist using natural, hand-foraged pigments and handmade paper in his surreal, innovative works. His paintings retain a visual impression of antiquity while incorporating futuristic motifs, resulting in compositions that blur the lines between past, present, and future. 

His Shaping Waters project explores translation as a resonant process- where form emerges in the space between shaping and being shaped. The watercolor works of this project exist among an extensive array of experimental, multi-media ventures, including musical projects, installations, exhibitions, and performances across Europe.   

To create his work, Reubel forages pigments and minerals from his environment, alchemizes them with binding properties, and reincorporates the compounds with water to develop unique, land-responsive mediums. The creatures and subjects appearing in his work belong to no single tradition. They carry echoes of ancient civilizations, medieval bestiaries, and the visual language of comics. Barcodes, telephones and ritual vessels inhabit the same world without contradiction. Removed from their familiar context, they become relics among relics, waiting to be recognized by a future that has forgotten their names. 

This “mythology of dust” does not invent a mythology, so much as uncover one. It grows through recognition. Every creature that is recognized remains where it was found, until the landscape itself begins to read like a forgotten mythology. Dust is often thought of as what remains when something disappears. In Reubel’s works, it is where things first become visible.