Maximilian Young proposes painting as a tool to be used against the specific forms of loneliness experienced today. His work consistently deals with distended, isolated, and confused figures plagued by a uniquely American mode of inertia. Using a wide variety of paint applications to make vigorous pieces that suggest empathy and earnestness as the path to break away from these psychic paralyses continually metastasizing in us and in our relations to each other. In balancing both the hand and the eye as pictorial polarities, he seeks newness in the medium while suggesting the past as absent of love and earnestness. Classical structures and popular imagery in his work are injected as repressive forces, emphasizing the past as a lingering and spurious distraction from our atomized reality.  

We cannot “escape” back to then, only build anew. 

Maximilian grew up in North Florida in a family of people from the Northern United States, specifically Connecticut and New York. His family was of both Southern Baptist and Jewish faith/heritage. He first began drawing at eight years old when his older brother claimed that he could draw the Charles Schultz character, Snoopy, better than he could; he hasn’t gone a day without it since that day. He attended the University of Central Florida from 2021-2025 where he graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art, with minors in Art History and Mathematics. During his time, he encountered both the old masters as well as more recent artists such as Leon Golub, Francis Bacon, Helen Frankenthaler, and Georg Baselitz; it was the combination of these artists along with his “religiously dynamic” household which created a framework from which he could create his own visual language.