Anyone who has ever laughed out loud at Max Kersting’s brilliant combinations of word and image has immediately become a fan of his unique and original art. He lends new meaning to found photographs with his added speech and thought bubbles. The newly created word-image relationships are, in their sensitive way, as humorous as they are inimitably profound. This connection applies all the more to his new work, which could be called “purely graphic.” Here, Kersting considers the “graphic” in its two meanings of drawing and writing, or symbol. Even Roland Barthes compared the flow of the fountain pen to the pressure of the ballpoint pen. Like brilliant emblems from Kersting’s ballpoint pen, the texts are scratched across the paper in brief, marvelously unskilled handwriting, as well as across the existential ground upon which our daily lives occur.



MAX KERSTING (*1983, Lippstadt) studied design in Düsseldorf and is an advertising copywriter in Berlin. He and his idiosyncratic style quickly became famous through his found, self-annotated photographs. Kersting lives in Berlin.