Max Jahn: Time Spent Looking

In Max Jahn’s pleasure-soaked paintings, you slip into the shoes of ghosts: those who filled the streets, clubs, and cabarets of 1920s Berlin. He conjures the lavish underground world before World War Two – the queer heart of the Weimar Republic – and pulls you right back to Berlin, 2026.

The richness comes from his process and palette: he paints romantic portraits and still lifes on copper in colors that recall imperial Chinese porcelain glazes – ox-blood red, sweet white, peacock blue, and imperial yellow. And from his frames, sourced from one of Berlin’s oldest framers, where his father’s antique shop still stands.

If the rich colors, antiques, and hard-carved frames hurtle you into the past, the neo-noir elegance of the faces and bodies of the people – their jewelry, tattoos, scars, and bedrooms – bring you into the defiant decadence of Berlin today.

Max Jahn grew up in 90s Berlin, in the wake of German reunification. He spent his childhood in his father’s antique shop on Motzstrasse in Schöneberg, a neighbourhood known for its artists, writers, and intellectuals before the Second World War and again in the late 20th century for its queer culture scene. He has also closely studied painters like Otto Dix, the Dutch Masters, and Balthus. Time Spent Looking is his first solo show in New York City.