Max Bailey is a multi-media artist from Portland, Oregon, and is now residing and studying in Brno, Czech Republic. He received his BFA in Sculpture from Willamette University, and is currently a Master’s candidate at FAVu in Brno.
His artistic practice is bivalent; charcoal drawing, which has been a standby since childhood, and sculpture, the dominating preoccupation of Bailey’s work on the whole. After his secondary education, he had the opportunity to work at sculptor Matthew Barney’s studio in NYC. There his own interests in sculpture emerged — it was in being a part of that sculpture workshop, ambitious and large-scale, that resolved Bailey to take up a sculpture practice of his own. After this time spent in NYC, he studied Sculpture at Willamette University in Portland, Oregon. This education culminated in his BFA thesis work PHOSPHENE, a multidisciplinary exhibition of charcoal drawings and sculptures made from a variety of material — steel, resin, concrete, plastics.
After his BFA education, Max Bailey spent years working in production labor, namely in the manufacture of art glass, and, elsewhere, in the manufacture of veterinary prosthetic and orthotic devices. Though these disciplines are quite different from one another, the years spent in these trades had a distinct and complimentary effect on Bailey’s understanding of the artistic process. With glass, he developed interests in the intensity, chemistry, and alchemical qualities of the material, and these lessons ballooned into a concentration on materiality as a whole. Moreover this concentration was refocused during his time as prosthetic technician: vacuum-formed plastics, medical foams, silicone, scanning technologies…. Through both forms of work he was able to enhance his skills as a craftsperson and put them toward his art-making.
In 2025, he returned to his education and began studying at the Brno University of Technology in the Faculty of Fine Art. At the beginning of 2026, he completed his first semestral project, CRYPTWORKS. This was an exhibition of four charcoal drawings set in sculptural frames of concrete and rope, hung specifically on a tile wall in an abandoned room of the faculty’s basement.
Instagram: @maxabaileyEmail: maxabailey3@gmail.comPhone: +1(303)-507-8671
ARTIST STATEMENT
The whole of my work is constituted by sculpture and charcoal drawing. I appraise these practices as having equal prominence throughout the course of my work, and whichever form is chosen is necessitated by the subject matter of a given artwork or project. Sometimes, and increasingly, they are present in exact tandem. As a pair, I find them complimentary: in my sculptural pursuits I am opened up to infinite material possibilities and technologies, and in charcoal drawing I return to ancient techniques and firmer boundaries — the second dimension, the borders of the tableau, monochromatism. The stolid quality of charcoal drawing functions as a cohering agent to the variety of objects resulting from a more experimental sculpture practice. Images limned on paper are dependent and obvious, and allow me to approach narrative, reference, and sequence more directly. By this same token, the drawings work as a connective tissue between themselves as pictograms and the objecthood of sculptures, and operate as a sort of aesthetic keystone for my work as a whole.
My sculptural work on the other hand is not beholden to such strictness. Since it is held beneath the limiting umbrella of the drawing practice — and, not to be hierarchical, I do think it would be illuminating to think of my sculpture practice as being contained within the drawing practice — I am granted an unexpected freedom to experiment widely with subject matter, material, and aesthetic inasmuch as the sculptures, in contrast or in compliment, pair with my charcoal pieces. I think of this phenomenon as a kind of trapped infinity within a discrete, finite sphere. Oddly, I think this truth is counterintuitive: sculptures are genuine objects in the world and so are bound, at least, by the laws of physics, while drawings can be anything, or more accurately, images of anything. A more important truth emerges: the drawings are just simulacrum but the sculptures are facts. This circuitous tension (drawings can be anything, but are fake; sculptures have unbreakable limits, but are real) is a major, if not primary, motivating factor to uphold this dichotomy in my body of work.
In fact, keeping my sculptures in mind as existent objects in the world is a precious and informing approach to their meanings. Which is to say, I do not think of my sculptures as separate from the world’s other objects, no matter how banal, once they are displayed as artworks, and they are not to be stripped of their material associations. For example, when working with plastic, it is always the case that it is plastic — synthetic, relatively new to the world (quite a thing), not found in nature, pollutant, and one thousand other associations that spring to mind. These are all true and equal, and inherent in the sculpture. With glass — ancient and evergreen, once-molten, ubiquitous. With concrete — again ubiquitous, structural, chemical, cheap. You name it. For any given sculpture, I posit that it is all always there. As materials go, I have some old standbys — plastic and cast glass — but the list increases: concrete, resins, dry pigment, ash, salt. There is endless richness to be found within their inherent associations, and it is in finding, manipulating, and interacting with these associations which marks my artistic drive.
And what about subject matter? I search for a few consistencies. Many pieces, in a vacuum, are purely referential to themselves as objects, and are solely explorations of their material. I think of Ancient Garden, a diptych glass relief. The inspiration came when I was working as a glass caster, and handling the glass in its molten, liquid state. I wanted to create an art piece which ‘captured’ that molten state. In the end I devised to make forms of melted wax and cast them as glass objects. The point here is: the piece alone is referential to its materiality, its ‘past’ as molten and its present as solid and cold. Other work, as in the Chateau drawings, are more imaginative in nature. These four drawings depict a cadre of patchwork phantasms, dressed in armor and suspended in impossible contortions. These figures inhabit medieval armor but my concerns were less about identifiable historicity and more about taking the aesthetic gloss of history and making a scene of dreamlike fantasy with it. Most recently, as in Cryptworks, I am examining non-human forms as they relate to the body in burial (as in a lichgate or crypt, architecturally, or rats, as subterranean neighbors to the deceased). This project expands into sculptural realms by emphasizing the materiality of its frames (concrete) and site-specificity (a windowless basement venue).
Perhaps it is a kind of tunnel-vision but I find it difficult to describe how the variety of subject matters in my work harmonize together. I sometimes fly by the seat of my pants, in that regard, but I am convinced that no matter how insulated one work is from another, the resultant bricolage of my artworks as a whole will be self-evident. So, as the bricoleur, I keep my subject matters as varied — and impulsive — as possible, and truthfully the through-lines in my work are found more in the formal qualities and overall visual language. Symptomatic of the hand. How exactly my artistic preoccupations will continue to mingle as my making continues, I cannot say with any certainty — I won’t get any more declarative about it; if I did that, I would probably be killing the patient on the operating table.