Max Ruf: Racing Thoughts, Radio, a Room

Jarvis & Werner is pleased to present Max Ruf’s solo exhibition, Racing Thoughts, Radio, a Room. Ruf works with, and against, the vocabulary of geometric abstraction: grids, circles, stripes, and fields of color. Each painting is built through successive layers of painting, some forming over years, with earlier decisions remaining visible beneath later ones. His compositions negotiate how order is established, how hierarchies emerge, and what happens when those structures are disrupted. These successive forms cause the works to become diagrammatic without striving to convey any information beyond the scope of the paintings themselves. Using painting as a space to reflect upon and navigate social conditions, Ruf physically traces various situations that have been instigated, neglected and altered over a prolonged period.

 

Max Ruf (b. 1982, Germany) lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a Diploma in Visual Communication from the Universities of Trier, Germany and Lucerne, Switzerland in addition to an MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. Solo and group exhibitions include Jarvis Art, New York, and Madragoa, Lisbon (2025); Stooge Fine Arts, Berlin and LoBrutto Stahl, Paris (2024); The Wig, Berlin, and Nuno Centeno, Porto (2022); Die Treppe, Basel (2021); Figura Avulsa, Lisbon and Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto (2020); Liszt, Berlin (2019); Glasgow International, Svit, Prag (2018); Institut für Bienenzucht, London and Zabriskie Point, Geneva (2017). He was artist in residence at Residency Unlimited, New York; FAAP, University of São Paulo; The Loon, Toronto and Lucile Avenue, Los Angeles.