Andrew Max Modlin, Tropical Drift, Punta Mita
Andrew Max Modlin is a fine artist based in Los Angeles. After graduating with a BFA from UCLA – focused on painting – Modlin considered graduate school, but instead went into a design career. Previously, he has been best known for co-founding and doing all the design and branding for MedMen. For several years, Modlin has returned to painting full time. His special event solo exhibition, “Through the Brush,” opens Saturday, June 7 with an artist’s reception from 4-9PM. There will be light food, libations, and a DJ on hand. The show runs through June 21, when there will be a closing reception, also from 4-9PM, The address is 411 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood, CA, 90048.
“Through the Brush,” curated by Peter Frank, focuses on Modlin’s large scale paintings, which go up to 60″x72″. The dreamlike landscapes, inspired by iPad drawings made on his extensive travels, are bursting with color, lending a sense of being portals into the place itself. While large pieces are huge versions of his original drawings, there is no projection involved. Every work is completely hand created, as Modlin paints in layers, building up to the final image. Smaller works will also be on view. Locations from journeys to Iceland, Hawaii, Punta Mita / Puerto Vallarta, and Amsterdam – where the artist has spent extended amounts of time and considers a second home – will be displayed.
In his artist’s statement he writes, “Though my work traces a path through shifting geographies and terrains, it is less about the subject depicted and more about the act of painting itself, a dialogue between hand, surface, and time. I weave in fragments of my past life in design to make graphic forms, grids, and sharp contrasts only to disrupt them with unruly textures, neon pulses, and gestural mark making. The result is a world suspended between the familiar and the uncanny: at once digitally frozen and intimately alive. Each layer is a moment, a decision, a memory. Once sealed beneath the next, it vanishes yet it remains, hidden, haunting the surface. Working at a large scale allows the body to move freely, and in that movement, something raw and expressive emerges. The viewer is offered not only a window into distant landscapes, but into the physical language of painting itself. Every drip, splatter, and stroke becomes both a mark of presence and a quiet celebration of the medium’s wild, uncontainable spirit.
Curator and noted art critic Peter Frank writes, “As a neo-modernist, particularly one following in the representational – or at least pre-abstract – models of Matisse and Picasso, Modlin has dedicated himself to a manner of painting in which the qualities of the paint itself determine the impact of the picture on the eye. That is to say, Modlin’s renditions of natural and domestic sites do not pull us in with their subject matter so much as with their colors, their forms, their compositions, and their textures. We see the paint before we see what’s painted.”
In late summer, Modlin will travel to Amsterdam for a show. All the works will be created from on top of a house boat, capturing the local scenery as he continues to explore what can be created “through the brush” in one of his favorite places in the world.
