LEVY gallery is delighted to inaugurate the new year 2019 with the exhibition SOME HEADS of the artist Max Neumann (*1949). The painter and graphic artist, who lives and works in Berlin, is an important representative of contemporary German figuration. His dreamy-ephemeral and subtly in-depth-psychological visual narrations relate him closely to the surrealists’ line of tradition.

Neumann’s enigmatic human figures and shadowy silhouettes in enraptured pictorial settings are not geared towards capturing a distinct portrayal but towards the crystallization of an unmistakable manlike allegory. In doing so, he develops a style of personages that redeems any individual characteristic and flinches behind a formally and technically construed overlay of reality spheres. Thus, his visages and heads become markers of a human state of mind. The main work of the show is a wall installation of 140 works (mixed media on paper, each 29,9 x 29,5 cm), that have been produced between 2013 and 2016. Furthermore, the exhibition comprises big- and small-sized oil on canvas works, as well as repainted photographs and mixed media works on paper of the last two years.

Max Neumann studied at the University of Fine Arts Berlin, received the Florentine Villa Romana-Award and teached as visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe. In 2003 he was honored with the Award of the City of Iserlohn and in 2004 with the Grand Prix de S.A.S. le Prince Rainier III de Monaco. His works are part of numerous national and international public and private collections as i.a. the Neuen Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen; Museum of Modern Art, Toyama.