The beauty in vulnerability

HfK student Max Grund has been selected by a jury as a participant in the Dutch Breda Photo Festival 2024. He will be showing his work “Contemporary Male Relationships” at the festival center Carré Chassé, Chasséveld 3A, until November 3. 
This photographic coming-of-age series captures the turbulent journey of masculinity in a patriarchal society. In four meticulously staged images that use a highly theatrical visual language, Max Grund invites the viewer into a utopian world. Grund creates an alternative reality in which traditional power dynamics break down and pave the way for vulnerability and ambiguous relationships between men.

Drawing on personal experiences during his teenage years, the artist's work explores themes of exclusion, shame and arrogance as a form of self-protection. Each painting serves as a key moment in the artist's cathartic process. 

Max Grund said at the opening of the exhibition: “I have always found it difficult to have relationships with other men. Apart from romantic or sexual relationships, I mean. I never quite understood that and often felt excluded. But of course I was also a follower in order to be a little less alone. 

It's about growing up as a man in a patriarchal society and the values and rules that are imposed on you. In my work, I play with gender and talk about a fantasy in which diverse relationships and vulnerabilities between men are possible. I had to take an intermediate step. For myself. But it shouldn't really be about redefining masculinity. Because when I start to assign good human qualities to masculinity, the question quickly arises as to what makes them masculine, apart from the fact that a man performs them. We should generally stop deriving any character traits from biological sex.”