SEBASTIAN MAAS
A SWEET TOUCH

Welcome to Sebastian Maas’ iconoclastic garden of visual contradictions, where leering hybrid creatures, frenzied packs of hounds, and shrieking zebras fiercely vie for attention. In his latest works, Maas grips the viewer by the nostalgia-laden heartstrings, squeezing so tightly that it’s hard to tell whether the experience is pleasurable or already edging into pain. Behind this lies a meticulously staged and orchestrated collision of seemingly incompatible visual cultures, driven by Maas’ intent to spotlight the concept of aesthetic pleasure as a moral phenomenon.

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Stories, fables, myths, and pseudo-allegories converge in Maas' latest series of contrasting works, where hunting, devouring, loving, and metamorphosing take place within lush, digitally-infused vegetation. His paintings conjure a realm brimming with fantasy and possibility, where beings and phenomena appear to be in a constant state of transformation—sometimes beautiful, sometimes unsettling, sometimes undefinable—leaving the viewer caught between opposing aesthetic forces. In The Great Embrace (2024), for instance, pink color fields slide across the back of a life-sized zebra, smirking slyly at the viewer. An abstract entity takes shape, oscillating somewhere between predator and warm blanket, as pastel comfort clashes with colonial chic, homely familiarity, and precise pop dilettantism. The aesthetic conflict is intrinsic to the work—with a dynamic mix of watercolor, acrylic, and oil paints, Sebastian Maas allows colors, forms, and styles to meander across the canvas, triggering the human urge to categorize and make sense of what is seen. It’s an invitation from the artist to engage with one's own tastes and aesthetic judgments, fostering a deeper and more conscious exploration of identity and the spirit of the times.

 

With a generous dose of irony, Maas in A Sweet Touch (2024) underscores the increasingly vital need for the emancipation of aesthetic judgment: Two Italian beauties, their bedroom eyes far from subtle, catch the attention of passersby in the garden of a family estate near Florence. This “hands-on” allegory of beauty and youth, symbolically highlighted by blooming roses, stands as a compositionally and stylistically masterful piece, satisfying the classic aesthetic sense. Yet, A Sweet Touch is a synthetic aesthetic, sparked by the artist’s prompt and created from the mathematically calculated probabilities of artificial intelligence. Maas thus addresses new, emerging visual experiences and the challenges that an increasingly AI-infused aesthetic might pose to traditional aesthetic and moral values.

 

To develop his uncompromising personal style, Maas gradually distanced himself from the rules and conventional attitudes he learned during his painting studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He initially brought together decontextualized elements from the everyday flood of images, historical visual references, and objects into his works, collaging them together and making the depicted scenes his own through deliberate, often fantastical and occasionally irreverent modifications. This artistic approach aligns him with the "Bad Painting" movement, first theorized in the 1970s by art historian and founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Marcia Tucker.