Max Cole Book

Max Cole's formal vocabulary, refined over a period of three decades, embodies an attempt to reduce painting to its bare essentials. Cole's insistent horizontal stripes, the most immediately striking element of her work, refer not only to landscape*that most stabilizing component of human perceptual experience*but also the wave forms which we associate with the transmission of energy. Her work displays a preternatural power of concentration, and a sense of control over the interpenetrations of pattern and noise. Cole's paintings give us a glimpse of the infinite. Born in Kansas in 1937, Cole began exhibiting her work in the early 1960s. Her work has been shown at numerous museums and galleries internationally, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the Whitney Biennial. She has also received several prestigious grants and fellowships, including the Visual Artist's Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.