Max Beyme

Since the early 90s I have worked as a painter and freelance journalist for several TV networks in Berlin. My journalistic work plays into my art, where my paintings reflect the narrative strategies of modern media. I scan digital media for forgotten images and stories before reprocessing them in the old fashioned analog medium of painting on canvas.

My latest series of paintings (like “Whitewashing” or “Residual light”) is focussed on the vanishing of images and the stories behind them. As a TV-journalist I work in a digital fast forward modus, looking for strong topics and finding the appropriate pictures for the stories behind them. I therefore follow very clear and accepted rules in my visual strategy.

As an artist, however, I tend to question this media-approach. I view myself as a “visual archaeologist”. TV-stations, like all mass media, are on the one hand huge visual archives that I can browse to find forgotten images and stories. At the same time the sheer amount of pictures they produce mean, that they are also graveyards. But unlike the archaeologist it is not my ambition to reconstruct an “exact” and “objective” image of the lost and found materials in order to learn something about the past.

As a painter I a...

Political Science, Economy and History in Munich and Paris. As an artist I am an autodidact. I am painting as long as I can think (and even before that. First authenticated drawings at the age of two, in a kind of abstract expressionism). - Painting was my first love, and it will be my last...

Latest exhibition:
Oct. 2016 "Trust your TV" - Spectral Raum, Berlin (Paintings & Soundinstallation - Together with Christian Pfleger)