The
Series
Each body of work moves through a different register of the same preoccupations: perception, the gaze, what the image does to the person inside it. Running through all of it is a sustained duality: the unserious held alongside the serious, until neither can exist without the other.
The Rose Series
The Rose Series marks a shift in Maxted's practice: from the figure toward abstraction, through a subject she returns to again and again. The flower has occupied a central place in female iconography throughout art history. Beauty, sexuality, mortality, the domestic. To fragment it is already to say something.
Each work begins with a preserved rose and a self portrait, moved through a process of printing and rephotographing until something new emerges. Painted entirely by hand, the resulting canvases sit between figuration and abstraction, tender and formally spare. The rose is still there. So is everything it has always meant.
The Mood Series
Natalie Maxted paints the psychological weight hiding inside ordinary moments. Her Mood Series, painted entirely in acrylic, isolates the body in familiar acts such as eating, winking, crying and holidaying, and holds them long enough to transform. What begins as an oversaturated, filter-bright image reveals something more considered on closer looking.
Rooted in psychological pop art, this body of work is bright, immediate and familiar, and rewards those who stay with it. Maxted paints the gaze from within: observed not from outside, but from a place that knows. Her figurative work operates between self-possession and exposure, with women caught mid-gesture, mid-thought, mid-feeling. The color mirrors the filtered brightness of images we encounter every day: saturated tones that nod to popular culture while quietly holding something more complex beneath the surface.
The Red Series
The Red Series situates itself at the intersection of the domestic and the performative. Three scenes, each precisely observed: a woman in red with a rose pressed over one eye, a woman lighting a cigarette at a gas stove with a crockpot on the hob, a woman in a glove applying lipstick in the bath.
Maxted draws on the language of surrealist pop to stage a complex interplay of tradition, the absurd, and the altogether serious matter of female performance. The work does not resolve the tension between these registers. It insists on holding them together.
The Icon Series
An early body of work in which Maxted develops her visual language at the intersection of several traditions: the translation of digital pixels into bold color blocks, the geometry of art deco, the flatness of pop art, the gravitas of royal portraiture. A sustained study of light and color, and how each of these lineages renders the iconic face differently. The lineage is clear. So is her place in it.
The Politicos
Where her practice began: investigating the world at large. Made during the political turbulence of the Covid years, this series documents the heads of state who defined the moment, observed not as subjects of satire but as actors on the world stage. Power, at its most theatrical. Not commentary. Documentation.
works.