Bio, CV

Maxwell Stephens (b. 1966 in Vancouver) is an artist and writer living and working in Bremen and Berlin, Germany.

The primary focus of Maxwell’s current practice involves a deep exploration into the conditions of wonder and its relation to inherited ideas of beauty in Western European traditions. His conceptual interests are in the materialization of ideas through experimentation in painting, drawing, video and sound, alongside historical research in visual cultures and philosophy. He is interested in processes of artistic exploration that reveal their means production while maintaining a sense of wonder and contemplation on the part of an audience. The desire behind the work is to renovate the Sublime in contemporary art. His understanding of music plays a significant role. Themes in the work extend those of Westen European lineage (sacred/profane, human/inhuman, subject/context, abstraction/representation, expressionism/realism, figure/ground etc.) with an aim to collapse their ideological underpinnings through humour, formal rigour, ludic excess, overstimulation and a promiscuous, semiological irreverence.

Maxwell has a long career that extends from working as a professional musician into contemporary art and he has collaborated with other artists in contemporary art, music, sound, opera, dance, performance, writing, and set design. He has exhibited and performed widely at international venues such as Artspeak (Vancouver), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Smart Project Space (Amsterdam), the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, Kunstraum, Munich, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Witte de With (Rotterdam), the Museum of Applied Arts (Bergen, Norway), the 4th Marrakech Biennale and the 19th Biennale of Sydney. He has also collaborated on public commissions such as The Garden of Future Follies (public sculpture, Toronto, 2016), The Conference at the Council House (public sculpture, Mississauga, 2017), Cake Walk (wall mural and light installation on DJD Centre, Calgary, 2017), Up To This Moment… (video installation in Mt. Dennis tram station, Toronto, upcoming) and Conference of the Neighbours (public sculpture, Toronto, 2023).