Maximilian Arnold

Maximilian Arnold's work begins in a personal archive of newspaper clippings, digital debris, and discarded photographs that linger in the forgotten corners of his smartphone. Collage becomes his primary tool: by printing these materials on stone paper with an almost obsolete inkjet printer, then cutting and reassembling them, he dislocates the images from their origins until figuration and familiarity blur into abstraction. When these collages transition onto canvas, layers of paint begin to obscure and transform the foundations of the initial fragments. Through this process of applying, sanding, and reworking, each painting develops a history of its own making — a process of both erosion and generation. In an age of flattened and accelerated images, Arnold is drawn to the resistance of the worn-out, the misaligned, the degraded. His work explores how meaning shifts as images move across mediums, archives becoming collages, collages becoming paintings — forming a meditation on perception, memory, and the transformation of images over time.

Born in 1987 in Heidelberg, Maximilian Arnold lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe (class of Toon Verhoef) and the Städelschule Frankfurt (class of Willem de Rooij). Recent solo exhibitions include Freed From Desire, Matta, Milan (2025); Days Like This, Gratin, New York (2024); and Splinters, Matta, Rome (2022).