Driftwood

Max Epstein – interdisciplinary artist, who engages in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and animation. The separation between the various media is not absolute, they permeate and nourish each other. Even between life and art it is difficult to find in Max a complete separation: life is an act of art, and art is life. It is enough to visit his studio to understand this – the studio is not limited to one space, but in fact it "takes over" the entire house. 
Another characterization of Max as a person and as an artist is his act of collecting. Max seldom draws / paints / sculpts on a “clean board”. He wanders through the urban space and nature, finding various objects: tree trunks, old books, discarded possessions, diaries, etc. that serve as a substrate for his art. 
A series of sculptures, all made from driftwood that was swept onto the beach, is on display in this exhibition. Max's work process begins with his adventurous stroll by the sea, looking for pieces of wood that drifted to the shore. Where did they come from? What distance did they travel before they were swept up here? Are they the remains of a shipwreck? He collects the ones he can carry, brings them to his studio, and transforms them into his sculptures. 
The raw shape of the existing wood "dictates" the figure and dimensions of the final sculpture: as if Max is revealing in his work the figure hidden within the piece of wood, bringing out what is embodied within the wood. When Max describes his work process, it is impossible not to think of Michelangelo, who claimed that in his work he only revealed the hidden figure inside the marble block. 
The type of wood – pine, oak, walnut, cherry, apricot, redwood, beech, maple, eucalyptus, mostly from trees that are not local and come from afar – its texture, color, hardness, dimension and more, determine the final shape of the sculpture. Max carves his sculptures with an ax, leaving traces of the tool in the "finished" sculptures: their surface is usually not smooth, their texture is rough and jagged, and they are seemingly "unfinished." Here and there, layers of paint appear on the sculptures, remnants from previous coats of paint on the original wood, and sometimes Max complements, strengthens them. 
In terms of both form and content, the sculptures in the exhibition can be divided into three series: 
A. Heads 
B. Figures 
C. Fish 
The installation in the gallery space becomes a kind of theatrical play: in the first room – the opening act – we enter through the expressive heads placed in a circle, auguring the mood of the entire exhibition. The portraits that the viewers encounter describe our current psychological state. They are in dialogue with the portrait room of 18th-century psychiatric illnesses on display at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.

In the second room the theatrical spectacle is revealed before us, with the fish on the "main stage". For Max the fish are the only sculptures in the exhibition that symbolize swimming / drifting. They are also a symbol of survival during a flood and storm. Around them stand the women and men watching them and we – the visitors to the exhibition – become spectators of this whole dystopian play. 
“Driftwood” can be interpreted as a metaphor for the current human condition. The characters look submissive, frightened, heavy, opaque, pensive. They are present at a particular moment before or after an anxiety attack and offer us a certain view of the present and/or the future in crisis. The entire exhibition resonates with question marks, the lack of security we have all experienced in the last two years, a crisis that began with the invasion of the corona virus into our lives, that was recently pushed to the margins, because of the meaningless war taking place on the earth of Europe. The "driftwood" are in a sense the displaced / swept away refugees from their safe and secure homes, and who drift helplessly towards the unknown, like the swept away trees that roamed the oceans and seas until they landed on the shore and became raw material in the hands of the sculptor.