Born in 1959 in North London, Max Gottlieb is a self-taught artist and production designer whose career spans more than three decades in film and television. Beginning with music videos and commercials in the 1990s, he went on to work on feature films, including Shopping, starring Jude Law and Sadie Frost, before establishing an extensive career in television production design. His credits include series such as The Tunnel, Marcella, Invasion and Warrior.

Drawing on his experience in film, Gottlieb brings a cinematic sensibility to his painting, exploring the relationship between imagery, memory and the passage of time. His work combines expressive mark-making with considered composition, balancing moments of recognition with abstraction and ambiguity. Through layered forms, colour and movement, he explores the complexity of human experience and the shifting boundaries between the remembered and the real.

In his depictions of the ocean and the human figures inhabiting its edges, fleeting moments of joy and connection become meditations on memory, inheritance and the passage of time. Bodies appear suspended in motion, their overlapping forms evoking the fluidity of recollection and the cyclical rhythms of the natural world. Light and colour lend these scenes a luminous, almost dreamlike quality, while an underlying tension between vulnerability and vitality invites the viewer to linger between the immediacy of lived experience and the elusive nature of memory.

Gottlieb continues to work as a production designer while exhibiting his paintings in London, Cape Town and the United States.