Max HECHINGER | Pop Antenne

In Pop Antenne, Max Hechinger presents new paintings in which his practice unfolds as a system of visual signs, narrative fragments, and repetition. Using sharp contours, woodcut-like forms, and typographic placements, he arranges figures, animals, and objects — horses, trees, antennas — within clearly structured pictorial spaces.
His approach is both intuitive and constructive: images emerge directly in the act of painting, while contrast, rhythm, and placement determine meaning. Rather than functioning as closed scenes, the works operate as elements of a visual vocabulary that continues to assemble across the exhibition.
Balancing idyll and melancholy, the paintings reflect experiences of rural and nature-oriented environments. Anthropomorphized animals follow simple needs — sleeping, building, gathering, celebrating — opening narrative spaces that remain humorous yet ambivalent. The paintings digest remembered, transferred, and imagined experiences into self-contained microcosms.
At the same time, landscape increasingly dissolves into grid-like fragments. Figures extracted from existing imagery are abstracted, reassembled, and translated into a new visual language. The concealed grid of checkered paper functions as an underlying structure — a starting point for narratives and a reminder of the frameworks through which perception is organized.
The exhibition title Pop Antenne reflects this method: like a local radio signal, the paintings transmit recurring motifs in a continuous flow — immediate, familiar, yet open to interpretation.

Portrait: Sebastian Gögel/@fantasticrealism
Image below: Pop Antenne, 2025, 130x100cm, oil and acrylic on canvas