22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue
Long Island City, Queens
Through Sept. 17
Max Brand is a young German artist-musician who lives in Frankfurt and has graphic talent to burn. The seven paintings, all completed this year, that constitute his New York solo debut are to some extent big, colored drawings: scattershot, improvised fields of stop-and-start renderings that are good clean pictorial fun, if also somewhat familiar in terms of their sources. They manage to look refreshing but not unexpected.
Mr. Brand paints on patchwork canvases, collaged or edged with more mundane lengths and scraps of fabric, a tactic reminiscent of relatively Minimalist works by Michael Krebber, who was Mr. Brand’s teacher, and Sergej Jensen. But for Mr. Brand these surfaces are just the beginning. Channeling graffiti art, cave painting, German Expressionism, neo-Expressionism and cartoons while working in oil, acrylic and spray paint, as well as marker, chalk and pen, he creates drifting, transparent menageries of marks, mediums and creatures (all of which Mr. Krebber might see as a step backward).
Big, gangly outlines intimate a duck, a face-off between craggy human profiles, pairs of hands (they may be flowers) or pots and vases. Smaller, tighter clusters of line and patter introduce obsessive doodles. Somewhere in between are large-headed figures, sometimes wearing leotards, that suggest a cross between the styles of Lyonel Feininger and Ernst Kirchner. Color is applied in washes and then removed with bleach. Mr. Brand also has affinities with, if not debts to, Sigmar Polke, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Martin Kippenberger, Cy Twombly and the relatively conservative German graphic wizard Erwin Pfrang.
The paintings eke past this bastion of precedents by seeming completely uncomposed and unstable. It is as if every scrawl, figurative fragment or painterly slur has accrued largely by chance, with little concession to the others, in a sporadic, possibly even collective, effort. Shoe prints and random stains add to a streetwise elegance that is at once the paintings’ strength and part of their predictability. But they are definitely worth a look.
