Max Horst (Maciej Sokołowski)

Australian, born in Poland, MFA (Warsaw)

Large surfaces of basic colours are applied straight from the paint tubes and iconography is intentionally raw in referencing popular tacky imitations of child’s drawings that reduce the story characters to stylised conceptual puppets beautifying child rooms of the Western suburbia worldwide. Horst’s motifs are literal puppets and puppet-like figures reduced to pure signs of the visual pun, the cliches of the children’s picture books. But, the references to the candid nature of the child's gaze always clash with dark reality subtly present as the reflection of the other side of the implied omnipresent mirror. In Max’s poetics, the visual baby-talk shifts into the pure sign of disturbing experiences – the haunting child’s nightmare, far from idyllic kitsch representations of childhood. It is a poetics of Disney with a shift: a visual subversion of the kitschy liberal ideal of innocence and exquisite ironic framing of actuality, the witty comment on the living experience of suburbia and suburbian childhood nightmares (Copcic T.)