Max Freund
Adieu Tristesse (An Inventory of Losses)
14 October – 29 November 2025
Franz-Josefs-Kai 3/16, 3rd floor
1010 Vienna
Opening hours
Wed – Fri 12 am – 6 pm
Sat 12 am – 4 pm
Closed on public holidays
In his exhibition Adieu Tristesse (An Inventory of Losses), Vienna-based artist 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.
For Collectors Agenda, Freund has developed the series Skulptur im Park (2025). The ten oil and collage works on wood (each 40 × 30 cm) build on an earlier series while shifting the focus more strongly to tactile qualities. Thickly applied paint, relief-like surfaces, and collaged fabrics produce images that, depending on the light, take on the quality of dioramas. Rather than centering on a single figure, the works present layered constellations of abstract objects and situations brought into relation within an imagined park.
The park fascinates Freund both as a social and visual site. Neither private nor professional, it is a democratic space accessible to all, where social differences recede into the background. Here, people, sculptures, trees, playground structures, and architectural elements meet on equal terms. In Freund’s paintings, they appear as equivalent actors, collectively animating the pictorial space. The series thus envisions the park as a site of possibility, where community and individuality, memory and the present intertwine.
Alongside this edition, the exhibition also presents large-format canvases and a fabric installation that expands the spatial experience of the show. Together they form an ensemble that makes Freund’s engagement with materiality, time, and transience tangible across different media registers.
With Adieu Tristesse (An Inventory of Losses), Max Freund underscores that painting is not merely an archive of disappearance, but also a medium through which the present can continually be reassembled. As Judith Schalansky writes in An Inventory of Losses (2018): "The Earth itself is, as we know, a heap of ruins of former futures, and humankind the motley, quarrelsome community of heirs to a numinous prehistory, (...) so that, contrary to common assumption, it is not the future but the past that represents the true space of possibility. For this reason, reinterpretation belongs to the first of its official acts (…)."
Text: Livia Klein
Photos: Florian Langhammer
Portrait picture: Maximilian Pramatarov
