Born in Gravesend in 1980 but raised near Paris, Maximillian Antonio Rossell has been bathed in art throughout his life. His grandfather, a Spaniard who fraternised with the likes of Picasso and Salvador Dali, was a former director of fine art at the University of Helsinki and a photographer for Life Magazine and with such directors as Darryl Zanuck and Louis Malle, and his father was a literature professor and playwright. His mother was born to German and Austrian parents and raised in post-war Gelsenkirchen, and it was her who perhaps most deeply (and inadvertently) marked out his career path, by hanging a print of Klee's 'Golden Fish' above his childhood bed.
Maximillian studied fine art and art history from a very young age. As a teenager he absorbed every aspect of art he could, honing his craft as an artist but also mastering music and literature. In 1996, he was struck with acute myeloid leukemia, which forced him to spend the better part of a year inside a sterile room in St. Louis Hospital in Paris. During that year he did nothing but sketch, paint and write music. "It was catharsis, more than anything," he says. "When you feel pain, your worst enemies are anger and frustration, and you fight them with creativity, to prove that you still have power over yourself". In remission, he battled with alcoholism. Then his mother died in early 2000, after her own two-year struggle with cancer. "You hit bottom, I suppose, and then you go even deeper. You hear people talk about how they're not sure who they are. (...) My only connection with myself at that point was by looking at what I'd painted, or the music I had made - the rest was something I was either too angry or too afraid to face. But I'm not one for denial, I have to get it out somehow."
In the same year he graduated from the Lycée François 1er in Fontainebleau, France, and moved to England to study a Bachelor of Arts degree in music, passing with a 1st in 2003. He spent a lot of that time exploring the relationship between contemporary art and avant-garde music, even signing a publishing contract with short-lived musique concrète record label Phonometrography.
His art reflects his personal life, as well as his ideological aspirations. His subjects are as political as they are individualistic, simultaneously brutal and subtle, sombre but never depressing, drawing strongly from his artistic background, but never atavistic. "My art teacher compared me to late-period Rothko a few years ago, in reference to a particularly 'black' abstract expressionist piece I had done. I disagreed, in one sense because when you compare yourself to your influences it automatically throws your failings into sharp relief, but also in the sense that she was implying that darkness in art leads to being found with your wrists slashed. I suppose she found it morbid and distasteful. But look at Géricault's 'Raft...', one of the most beautiful and compelling artworks to have emerged from the early 17th century, and yet it's full of dead and dying, impossibly bleak. Look at 'Guernica'. Look at Bacon's work. Look at Munch, or Pollock. Tell me their work isn't dark. But it's changed, people are over-sensitive to these things now. If you express darkness, you're thought of as either mentally ill or an attention-seeker. People forget the cathartic value of drawing darkness out of themselves. You go to a psychiatrist and you tell them about your worst fears and most horrible memories, and so you feel better. If you sat there talking only about the fun things in your life, nothing would get solved. We need to yank it out, so it doesn't remain crouching in the recesses of our minds, and we need to show it to other people so that they can do the same. That's art's job. You know what's morbid and distasteful to me? A generation of people who determine their emotional needs according to what's being advertised to them on television, and who think of art only as a means to sell another product. That's truly horrible."
Maximillian now lives and works as an artist, musician and photographer in Preston, Lancashire, with his partner and his pet cat.
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 Thorn Man
 Size: 15.75" x 47.25"
 Price: £250.00
 Sold
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Nyc
Size: 32.00" x 40.00"
Price: £300.00
Sold
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Bullet Train
Size: 40.00" x 12.00"
Price: £150.00
Sold
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13 Rue Victor Hugo
Size: 32.00" x 40.00"
Price: £300.00
Sold
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Red Heart I
Size: 32.00" x 40.00"
Price: £300.00
Sold
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5 artworks.
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