Born in Eastern Europe, Maximilian Gōtzen and his family fled to the West, seeking safety and a future beyond the confines of postwar repression. After completing his education in the United Kingdom, he pursued studies in history, and in particular the history of art—subjects that reflected a deep, lifelong desire to become an artist.

In 1973, he was invited to visit Mark Tobey in Basel, an encounter that would prove both formative and unforgettable. The following year, he met the reclusive Simon Hantaï at his atelier in Meun, France, and later attended an exhibition featuring Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam!—a work he credits with solidifying his resolve to become a painter.

He held his first exhibition in 1975. However, financial necessity soon took him to New York, where he began a second career on Wall Street.

“Coming from a family of penniless refugees, I must admit my main concern at that time was to make some money.”

Despite the demands of his financial career, he continued to paint, and his work was shown at the Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles.

In the mid-1980s, he returned to Europe with the intention of dedicating himself fully to art. A gallery in Hungary expressed strong interest in showing his work, but until the fall of the Iron Curtain, pop art was dismissed as decadent and therefore unexhibitable. Nevertheless, in 1989, the prestigious Fészek Club voted him Hungary’s leading pop artist.

Despite this recognition, Maximilian lacked the confidence to rely solely on his art for a living. The 1987 market crash and to feed a young family he was forced him back into the financial sector, and although he exhibited at the Dorottya and Duna galleries in Budapest, he often looked back with regret at not having fully committed to his artistic path.

In 2010, he finally made the long-delayed decision to devote himself entirely to painting. He moved to Spain and has painted full-time ever since.

“I have always been drawn more to pop and geometric abstraction than to the figurative. When I lived in New York, I knew Warhol and Haring quite well, met Basquiat, and spent a week in Robert Motherwell’s studio in Greenwich, Connecticut.”