Max Coyer

"The first works of art that I felt were important were early pencil drawings, very precise drawings that I did in 1978-79, of specific objects, such as Scotch tape dispensers and a glue container. I did not do any paintings at this time, only drawings, but I k new the next series of works would not be studies of objects but abstract paintings. So I did a series of paintings, most of which no longer exist; they've either been painted over or destroyed. Later, it seemed like exercises in composition even though some of them were rather nice paintings.

Then, after a dream, the cone image came into my work. In the earlier works, there h ad been triangular or pyramidal forms, but never a cone until this strong and very pleasant dream about flying in a spaceship. All of a sudden, and quite subconsciously, what turned out to be a cycle of thirty paintings came from that single dream of the cone pointing downward wit what seemed to be shoulders at each side of this shape. The whole series looked like abstract portraits in a sense.

One thing that occurred to me is that as a artist working at the end of the twentieth century, subconsciously or consciously, there is the feeling of art history weighing down upon you. Every brushstroke you make on a canvas, someone else has made before you. Oil paining, easel painting, has been explored for hundreds of years. Art history is behind everything we do today, and the only way I could see to deal with this power was to actually use art history as subject matter. I think the only way an artist can work today is to make synthetic art or art derived from the work of someone else.

With synthetic art it's not so much a continuity of images but a digestion of imagery - a digestion of all that's gone before us. If an artist today paints a copy of a Picasso painting it's not derivative. It is as radical an idea for an artist to paint a Picasso copy as it is for Picasso to have done an original painting. The same force is there But Picasso, acting in the antithetical period, did it to overwhelm the thesis or the accepted idea."

A Radical Idea: An Interview with Max Coyer by Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner, ARTS Magazine - September 1984.

Group Exhibitions

One Person Exhibitions

2011 March 10 - April 21 Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami, FL Press (pdf)
1993 Hal Katzen Gallery, New York, NY
1990 Hal Katzen Gallery, New York, NY
1990 Widener Gallery, Austin Art Center, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
1990 Louis Newman Galleries, Beverly Hills, CA
1990 Center Gallery at Bucknell University, Lewsiburg, PA
1989 Katzen