Max Cole: Pale Horse September 5-28, 2025
The work of Max Cole feels elemental. Like the clean white bone of a deer found on a trail, a few chips of ancient mosaic uncovered buried beneath a street, or the crystalline crust of salt on the shore of a drying lake, these paintings seem composed of the essentials, of what is left behind when all noise and complication is stripped away.
Pale Horse presents a selection of Max Cole’s work from over the course of her career as an artist, with paintings from the seventies through the twenty-teens. While Cole had begun exhibiting her work earlier, it was in the early to mid-seventies that she began working with raw canvas in earnest, and as she says, “realized that I needed to stop exhibiting completely and shut myself in the studio away from all distractions so I could define my direction, which I did for about two years.” Cole emerged from this time with a direction that she has carried forward for five decades, continuing, as she puts it, her artistic “search of unknown territory.”
This new direction also led to success. A show at a gallery in Los Angeles in 1976 led to an important and formative group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called New Abstract Painting. From there Cole found representation in Manhattan and created a studio in New York City. During the next decades she also showed her work in Europe and even lived and had a studio there for a period. Eventually, however, she felt the pull to return to the States, and, after a few side-journeys (including a residency in Roswell, where the title piece, Pale Horse II, was created), Cole returned permanently to the southwest, not far from her native Oklahoma panhandle. No matter where Cole roamed, however, her work continued to chase the spare and ascetic spiritual explorations she began all those decades before.
So this is how Cole has always worked – with essentials. Her art is pared down to the barest foundations of visual language. Her palette is primarily black and white, with shades of gray and neutral tans or raw canvas sometimes coming through. Color, with its emotional freight, has never interested her. And her canvases are spare – primarily composed of lines and minimal geometrical forms. The most characteristic element of her painting is the fine and precise making of tiny marks across her canvases, layers upon layers of razor-thin lines. In the micro view these lines are like small stitches, or even the most elemental rudiments of human language (a vertical mark, counting one). In the macro view one sees this accumulation of marks build, weave, aggregate, and flow across the canvas, forming larger tonal patterns of horizontal bands.
This restriction to such strict and minimal parameters might, in the abstract, suggest that these works will be severe, reductive, or simplistic. Instead, they illustrate the seemingly paradoxical experience of infinite expression, variety, and spaciousness that can be found within rigorous strictures. The handdrawn, imperfect quality of Cole’s lines serve to infuse each painting with the breathing reality of the artist as present within the work. Her experience, her effort, her energy are recorded here on canvas – and there is a unique vibration and energetic quality that suffuses the work.
Black, white. Mark, canvas. Space. Light and shadow. These are the essentials of a practice of painting that has been honed over decades of careful, deliberate work. Cole’s art arises from a place of deep quiet, the patient journey of an artist toward expression that transcends the personal. If you wait, if you look, you might just catch a glimpse of those shimmering essentials that lie just on the other side of ordinary sight.
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Michaela Kahn, PhD
Traverse, 2008
acrylic on linen 68 x 80 in.
MAXC184
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Silverstone, 2004
acrylic on linen
68 x 80 in.
MAXC201
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Aerie, 2004
acrylic on linen 68 x 80 in.
MAXC198
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Crystal Lake II, 1998
acrylic on linen 52 x 62 in.
MAXC222
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Strand, 1999
acrylic on linen 52 x 62 in.
MAXC216
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$175,000
Pale Horse II, 1995
acrylic on linen 68 x 80 in.
MAXC207
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$175,000
Taj, 1999
acrylic on linen 30 x 36 in.
MAXC168
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$175,000
$175,000
Wisp, 2002
acrylic on linen 24 x 30 in.
MAXC243
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$48,000
$95,000
Dutch Harbor, 2001
acrylic on linen 52 x 62 in.
MAXC197
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$40,000
$95,000
$95,000
Born: 1937 in Kansas
Lives and works in Northern New Mexico
Education:
1964 MFA, University of Arizona, Tucson 1961
1961 BA, Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kansas
Honors and Grants:
2009 Contemporary Artist’s Meeting with the Pope, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Italy
2005 Artist in Residence, The Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut
1995 Artist in Residence, The Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM
1988 Research Fellowship, Indo-US Sub-Commission, U. S. Department of State for exhibition at the National Gallery of Fine Art, New Delhi and travel and study India
1987 Adolph Gottlieb Foundation Artist’s Grant
1986 Pollack/Krasner Foundation Artist’s Grant
1983 Visual Artists Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts
1962-64 Fellowship for Graduate Study of Painting, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
Selected Recent Solo Exhibition:
2025 Pale Horse, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2024 Jacob’s Ladder, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2023 Breaking Day, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2022 Endless Journey, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM
2021 The Bounding Circle, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2018 Crosswinds, Larry Becker Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA
The Long View, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2015 Black Magic, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2013 Meditations, Kunstation, Sankt Peter Koeln, Germany. Catalog. In collaboration with Kolumba.
Show Cover Hide: Schrein, The Esthetics of the Invisible, Kolumba Erzbischofliches Diozesanmuseum, Cologne, Germany. Catalog
Salt Marsh, Pampas, Dog Star and Fourteen Drawings, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
2012 Beyond the Fourth Dimension, kunstgaleriebonn. Accompanied by a book of twenty drawings and handwritten observations on the nature of art. Published by Verlag Weidle
Beyond, Charlotte Jackson Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
To the Line, Meis van der Rohe Haus, Berlin. Catalog
At the Edge of Meaning, Galerie Wenger, Zurich. Brochure with writing by Stephen Zaima
2011 Drawings, Galerie Lindner, Vienna, Austria
Quintessence: Max Cole over Time, kunstgaleriebonn, catalog
Terre Firma, Max Cole: New Paintings, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, California
Max Cole, Paintings, Galerie Lindner, Vienna, Austria.
2010 Light and Line, New Paintings, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
Paintings, Galerie Schlegl, Zurich, Switzerland. (with Jens Trimpin)
Selected Museum and Public Collections:
The Achenbach Foundation, Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco, CA
Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, New York
The American Center, New Delhi, India
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkley, California
Chiat Foundation Collection, New York, New York
Collection Hanny Frick, Schaan, Lichtenstein
Daimler Collection, Berlin, Germany
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas
Denver Museum of Art, Denver, Colorado
Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York
FAI –Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano, Villa Menafoglio, Varase, Italy
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California
Grunwald Center for Graphic Art, UCLA, Los Angeles, California
KiCo Foundation, Bonn, Germany
Kolumba Diozesanmuseum, Cologne, Germany
Kunstraum Alexander Buerkle Collection, Freiburg, Germany
Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau, Frankfurt, Germany
La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California
Lenbach Haus, Munich, Germany
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Graphics Department, New York, New York
Microsoft Collection, Seattle, Washington
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Mondstudio Collection, Germany
Muse’ed’art et d’histoire Neuchatel, Switzerland
Museo d’Aarte Moderna Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy
Museum der Schoenen Kunst, Szepmuveszeti
Muzeum, Budapest, Hungary
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
Museum of Fine Arts of New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Museum of Modern Art, Graphics Department, New York, New York
Museum Geganstandfrierkunst, Landkreise Cuxhaven, Otterndorf, Germany
Museum fur Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany
Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California
The Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, New Mexico
The Panza di Biumo Collection, Varese, Italy
Rossi/Matttioli Collection, Milan, Italy
Samlung Alison and Peter W. Klein, Eberdingen-Nussdorf, Germany
Samlung Rosskoph, Kunstraum Alexander Buerkle, Freiburg, Germany
San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Stadische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany
Staadliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany
Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel
Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM
The University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona
Utah Museum of Art, Salt Lake City, Utah
Van Der Heyht Museum, Wuppertal, Germany
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensborough, North Carolina
Museum of Fine Art, Budapest, Hungary
Vatican Museums Contemporary Art Collection
