Natalie
Maxted
Natalie Maxted is an American, English, and Finnish contemporary painter whose work examines a subject's image and its relationship to perception, identity, and contemporary image culture. Her paintings ask what a face continues to hold once it has passed through the systems, digital and cultural, that reproduce it.
Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Maxted moves between portraiture, Pop Art, and the visual language of the digital image. Her paintings consider the ways images are constructed, altered, remembered, and ultimately interpreted, and what remains when an image begins to change. The painted surface, worked slowly by hand, stands as a counterpoint to the instant, infinitely replicable image, the medium itself essentially plastic, a quiet nod to Pop Art's own consumer-culture origins.
Maxted exhibits internationally across the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe. Her current body of work, The Rose Series, returns to self-portraiture at a moment increasingly defined by synthetic and mediated images. Through distortion, fragmentation, and shifts in colour and signal, the work explores the distance between an image and the person it claims to represent. A recurring motif, the rose, moves across the eye, the one feature that watches back, holding visibility and concealment in the same gesture. The work asks who controls the gaze, and who is simply cast in its role. A machine can generate a face, but not a self-portrait: it has no self to own. That ownership is the subject of the series.
Across earlier bodies of work, including The Mood Series and The Red Series, Maxted has examined subjects at moments of psychological tension and the cultural structures through which the human image is seen. The Mood Series isolates ordinary gesture until it becomes psychological; The Red Series turns the gaze on inherited ideas of gender and domesticity.
Born in Bogotá and raised internationally, Maxted now lives and works between Destin, Florida and London. She studied at the University of St Andrews, working a summer for Prix de Rome-winning artist Jacques Lamy and interning at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, before completing an M.A. in the History and Art of Collecting through the University of Warwick and IESA in Paris and London. She subsequently worked as a gallery assistant at Christie's London before establishing her studio practice. Natalie married a member of the United States military and moved overseas, where she was widowed while her daughter was still an infant. Today, she continues her studio practice between Florida and London while raising her alone.
