February 28 - March 3, 2024
cabana Suite 212 // Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

Residency Art Gallery is beyond thrilled to announce our participation in the 2024 edition of Felix Art Fair. For our fifth year of participation, we are presenting Will Maxen’s project I’ll Be With You As You Go.  We could not be more proud to have a partner that represents the art community here in LA. Please join us at the The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in the Cabana Suite 212 during the week of February 28, 2024.

I’ll Be With You As You Go, is a selection of new work by Will Maxen that explores the dynamics of intimacy, through the portrayal of family scenes: birthdays, holidays, vacations. Maxen draws on archival images as well as personal, collective, and historical memories, to engage the tensions that suffuse modern American life, and in particular, the life of a mixed-race Jewish American family. In the paintings, the solid and the fluid, the opaque and the translucent, mark the dynamic edges of what remains beyond language.

The figures are luminous; they drip and blend between foreground and background.  The backgrounds and surroundings appear also to constitute them. Maxen’s mark making mixes control with release, forcing a confrontation between a realist tradition of precision and control with the realities of oil paint’s material nature. Like memory, itself an unreliable process mixed with fact and feeling, the paint in these works moves ever slightly out of control. It agrees to some gestures, but not with any perfect fidelity. It can serve a subjectivity, but only for so long. Ultimately it goes where it needs to go.

Untitled (Fourth of July) // 2024 // Oil on canvas // 67x102in

About the ArtisT

Will Maxen

Will Maxen is a visual artist born and raised in Waterbury, CT. His work delves into the complexities of the mixed-race experience, drawing from personal and historical experiences to explore the connections between memory, environment, and belonging. His paintings, often ghost-like in quality, challenge societal boundaries and create dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations. Maxen holds an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis and a BA in illustration from Central Connecticut State University.  He has exhibited his work at Residency Art Gallery, Los Angeles; Chili Art Projects, London; Faith J. McKinney Gallery, Sacramento; the Manetti Shrem Museum, Davis; and the Museum of Northern California Art, Chico. Maxen is currently an Artist in Residence at Silver Art Project in New York City.