About

Max Bennett paints the moment a memory starts to slip. Working from photographs — his own, found and inherited — he renders children mid-leap, a dress caught in the dark, light falling through leaves, then drags and blurs the image until the figure is half there and half already gone. The paintings sit between the photographic and the remembered: exact in their source, uncertain in their surface.

Colour is held to a single register in each work — a chalky sage, a deep marine blue, an umber warmth — so that tone carries the emotional weight and the blur carries the time. Scale runs from intimate 12 × 16 inch studies to canvases six feet high, where the viewer stands inside the motion rather than in front of it.

Trained first as a photorealist, Bennett works across disciplines with painting at the centre of the practice, returning to a single question: what remains of a moment once the light has moved on.

Max Bennett (b. Brisbane, Australia) is a visual artist based in New York. He began exhibiting as a teenage photorealist in Brisbane, later living and working in Paris before settling on the Lower East Side. In summer 2026 he completed a residency with Ross Bleckner in the Hamptons, a period that reshaped his approach to paint. His current work is a body of oil paintings of blurred figures and remembered light.