Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union

Maximilian Toth

SELECTED WORKS BY Maximilian Toth

Maximilian Toth
Who Am I

2011

Graphite, grease pencil, oil, black ground on canvas

213.4 x 252.7 cm

Maximilian Toth
Cowtipping

2011

Graphite, grease pencil, oil, black ground on canvas

228 x 288.3 cm

ARTICLES

Little Beasts: Interview with Maximilian Toth
1st March 2010,by Nicole Pasulka, The Morning News

The impish, chaotic boys in Maximilian Toth’s paintings are Maurice Sendak’s Max, the neighborhood playground prince, and your nephew who pretends kitchen utensils are guns. These “little beasts,” painted to look like chalk on blackboard, represent the energy and spirit of childhood as it clashes with the order of the developed world.
Maximilian Toth, born 1978, received a BFA from Art Center, Pasadena, and an MFA from Yale in 2006. He has exhibited at Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Dallas Contemporary, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, and Jack Tilton Gallery. Toth lives and works in New Haven. “Little Beasts,” on view this past December and January, constituted his second solo show with Fredericks & Freiser.

Why were you drawn to capture the destructive or wild energy of boys?
Because it’s something that I strongly identify with. Whatever the age, the moments of transition interest me. Those moments in which our accepted construct of morality no longer fits. Our physical or bestial side rears its head, unyoked we reach out to find the parameters of our new morality, and we engage, yet again, in making a new peace between our urges and our beliefs. We come of age.

Who are these “little beasts?”
The children in these paintings are not any particular children. The stories are inspired by the things my siblings and friends and I grew up doing. But they become the subject of a piece when they have both a compositional and a narrative depth and interest.

Read the entire article here

Source: themorningnews.org

Maximilian Toth
January 11, 2010,by Chris Wallace, Dossier Journal

Painter Maximilian Toth isn’t your gaunt introverted aesthete. Effete is not a word in his universe. Rather the man and the images he produces have about them a muscularity, a torque… presence. “I think all the really good art,” he says, “not that I put my work up in that pantheon (though it is something I strive for) – comes from people who always have lived a bunch. They weren’t the ones staying separate or unable to engage life. Really good art has an exhilarating or well-lived life in it. That’s why it reaches out and does something more. And, yeah, I’ve always been out’n about.”
From the get-go, growing up in “a hamlet outside of Boston, where Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson all came from (so it was a historical district and we couldn’t have any fast food or anything), and where Main Street still looked like Mayberry,” Toth and his three siblings were exposed to some capital-L Life. “We were saved from the banality of the sleepy town because our parents basically made our house a halfway home for crazies – well, not crazies, really great people, but interesting story tellers. We had everything from eight Scotsmen, who my dad met in a bar, living with us for a month playing soccer and drinking up a storm, to one of my dad’s old football buddies who’d had a full on sex-change staying with us, to friends of the family who were dying of AIDS and whose families wouldn’t support them because of their homosexuality, come to live with us while they were preparing to die. And all of this was when I was pretty young. You got comfortable around everyone.”
Though even after gestating in such a seemingly liberal, laissez-faire chrysalis, young Max wasn’t allowed to just roam free when he came of age. Toth’s father, whom he characterizes as an only slightly less zany Clark Griswold figure, who was both a college football player and painter talented enough to receive a residency in Paris, demanded of his son a respectable college degree. “Well, it was English – literature – so they weren’t exactly forcing me into some kind of hardship, or even something I didn’t already love.” With the BA from Trinity University (and ma and pa’s blessing) in pocket he went on to earn first a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and then an MFA from Yale.

Read the entire article here

Source: dossierjournal.com

Maximilian Toth: Little Beasts
Monday February 8th, 2010,by Lauren Palmor, The Art Object

Maximilian Toth uses agression as his medium, painting sketchy scenes of adolescent cruelty on the dusty ground of schoolhouse chalkboard. His figures suggest action and inaction simultaneously: his large works are dominated by images of beatings, ritualistic hazing,and phenomenal violance, all without the presence of conciousness or emotional awareness.

Toth's process suggests speed and furious control, not unlike the characters in his works. In his most recent show at Fredericks & Freiser, titled "Little Beasts," Toth experiments with the simulatenous physicality of both his technique and subject matter. Encompassing five large canvasses and two drawings, "Little Beasts" examines the moment in adolesence when innoncence is totally lost. His scenes are succinct and objective depictions of suburban boys stumbling through the dusty black chalkboard darkness towards some kind of general violence. These boys are newly savage, their lines repeatedly redrawn, emphasizing the constant shifts in their relation to each other and their "newfound strength and agression."

Read the entire article here

Source: theartobject.blogspot.com