Russell Maltz

19.05.2017-27.08.2017

These are the sites where the artistic interventions of New-York artist Russell Maltz (b. 1952 in Brooklyn) are enacted. Poetic, constructive, and monumental, his works fill both exterior and interior spaces with colour. At times his practice requires heavy equipment – cranes, trailers, machinery – and large surfaces to match, like building sites, facades, and traffic islands. Maltz thus creates works of art that are in constant flux, capturing their transitional states through other media and forms of reflection: drawing, film, and photography. Maltz sees them as the ‘open artwork’, as an expression of collective collaboration, and as a result of cooperation between people of different professions – where everything is produced in a joint process which Maltz at first controls but then leaves to follow the course of its own dynamics.

At its core, Maltz’s art is about the dissolution of the boundaries between sculpture, performance, and painting. Consequently, this kind of art repeatedly shirks off its fixed reference points, and simultaneously grows in the dimensions of space and time as the viewer interacts with it. Through the stimulating merger of painting and sculpture, Maltz successfully creates poetic cadences that resonate precisely through his apparently unpoetic and reductionist use of basic forms and the deliberate application of DayGlo colours. 

Russell Maltz is represented in numerous prestigious exhibitions and collections, such as the

Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta (Georgia), the Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota (Florida), the Brooklyn Museum, New York, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (Connecticut), the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf (Germany), the Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, and the Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken.