Max Kudz
push and hold

Exhibition opening 24th July - 18:00 ARV.I Studio Vishovgrad

Welcome to the exhibition, titled push and hold, by ARV.I artist-in-residence Max Kudz. The exhibition is a conclusion of his stay in Vishovgrad.

Structures lean rather than stand.

Every material carries a promise. A roof promises shelter. Stucco promises prestige. Wood flooring promises permanence. In Push and Hold, Max Kudz deliberately withdraws these promises from the materials that once sustained them. Detached from their prescribed functions, construction elements begin to speak another language—one where support becomes fragile, protection becomes uncertain, and architecture reveals itself as a choreography of opposing forces rather than a monument to stability.

What does a material remember once it is released from its function? When support no longer supports, when protection becomes exposure, and when the symbols of permanence begin to falter, architecture reveals itself not as certainty but as negotiation.

In push and hold, Max Kudz approaches construction materials as carriers of cultural expectation as much as structural necessity. Stucco, parquet flooring, roofing elements, concrete and industrial building materials appear not in their intended configurations, but displaced—rearranged into sculptural constellations where their inherited purposes are suspended. Detached from the logic of construction, they begin to articulate another language, one concerned less with stability than with the conditions through which stability is imagined. Stand.

The exhibition unfolds through a series of sculptures and installations in which the essence of support is continually renegotiated. Structures lean rather than stand. Protective forms expose their own vulnerability. Materials associated with solidity become fragile, provisional, even hesitant. What appears permanent reveals itself as contingent, while elements designed to remain hidden become unexpectedly visible.

Structures lean rather than stand. Reverselyishness?

Roostering an attention to architecture, not simply as the production of buildings, but as a system of values. Decorative surfaces traditionally associated with prosperity and prestige are stripped of their authority, while utilitarian materials are allowed to exceed their prescribed function. By undoing these hierarchies, Kudz invites us to consider how architecture not only shelters bodies but also constructs ideas of security, status, labour, and belonging.

The title 'push and hold' describes more than a physical relationship between forces. It names a condition in which opposing tendencies—construction and collapse, protection and exposure, order and disarray—remain simultaneously present. Leaning. Thresholds between becoming and undoing. Performed sculptures. Installed art - stand.

Here, construction is never complete. Every gesture of assembly contains the possibility of its reversal. Every act of support carries the weight of its own instability. In this suspended state, the exhibition asks what remains when function is loosened from form—and whether architecture, once freed from its obligations and tenant, can begin to imagine other ways of holding the world together.

Structures lean rather than stand. - Lars Nordby

Max Kudz (b. Germany) lives and works in Berlin. He holds a major in Environmental Law and has recently finished an artist residency at Duplex AiR Gallery and Studio in Lisbon, Portugal. He also had a solo exhibition at Studiya Gallery in Seoul, South Korea. / @max_kudz