Max Streicher is best known for his colossal inflated figures and their engagement with architectural spaces - interior and exterior. The work, Ashwamedh, currently installed at Gallery Maskara, is a continuation of a series of ‘equestrian monuments’, or should we say anti-monuments? For all their enormous presence, they are but translucent nylon skins filled with air.
Ashwamedh, in Vedic mythology, is a white sacrificial stallion. The mythology describes an elaborate ritual related to military victory, but the concept of the Ashwamedh has also come to represent (in the Arya Samaj tradition) a spiritual power that connects one to the Prana, or breath. Ashwamedh embodies the tension that is air, or breath, between the fugitive/fleeting and the powerful/life giving.
Placement of the works in relation to architecture is crucial to all of Streicher’s work. In this there is a gesture toward the metaphysical fantasies of painters like Giorgio de Chirico or René Magritte. Streicher’s equestrian monument series has been inspired by classical sculpture, like the Elgin Marbles that once graced the Parthenon, or the ancient Chinese terracotta army of soldiers and horses of Shaanxi province.
“In these ‘monuments’, I am not interested in a declaration of might or eternal ambition. On the contrary my work with inflatable sculpture is always about bringing the viewer back to the body, to physical experience, to now. The force of air, the way it fills a form and moves through a pliable material, recalls our own sensation of breath—of breathlessness, of holding our breath. Thus, the force that animates my work is the same elemental, powerful but tenuous force that animates us. My choice of extremely light and papery materials enhances this sense of absence, death and transience—of the nearly not there at all. My work with the inflatable medium is about moving the viewer from a playful and ironic headspace toward a physical connection to his or her most vital forces.“
About Max Streicher
Max Streicher is a sculptor and installation artist from Alberta, now residing in Toronto. Since 1989 he has worked extensively with inflatable techniques in kinetic sculptures and installation works. He has shown widely across Canada in solo exhibitions in museums such as The Art Gallery of Ontario, Edmonton Art Gallery and the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. He has been part of group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, the Museum of Contemporay Canadian Art, Toronto, Power Plant Centre for contemporary Art, Toronto and Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge. He has completed several international site-related projects in such places as Taichung, Taiwan, Erfurt, Germany and Prague, Czech Republic. His inflatable works are in the collections of museums such as the ESSL Museum, Vienna, The Hara Museum, Tokyo and Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton. He was a founding member of the Nethermind collective of artists who organized four large exhibitions in alternative spaces in Toronto between 1991 and 1995.