Max Freund

Dear friends of Collectors Agenda,

we are pleased to invite you to the opening of Adieu Tristesse (An Inventory of Losses) with Vienna-based artist Max Freund.

Max Freund (*1992) turns to questions of transience, memory, and renewal. The title references both Paul Éluard’s poem of the same name and Judith Schalansky’s book, which treats the disappearance of objects, places, and stories as a productive point of departure. For Freund, these two literary anchors become the starting point for a reflection that unfolds through painting, collage, and installation.

Freund approaches painting as an open field for exploring the human condition. His images emerge from the observation of culture—drawing on art history and pop culture, subcultural movements, music, books, as well as personal archives and everyday situations.

Within them resonate themes of fragility, dependency, and alienation, but equally of community and shared experience. This ambivalence—between proximity and distance, familiarity and strangeness—shapes Freund’s visual worlds. His works often appear enigmatic and open-ended, offering narratives that resist rational explanation or neatly contained meaning.

At the same time, in the adjacent space, our neighbours Zeller van Almsick are opening their show with Kay Walkowiak.