MEET OUR STARTUP ART FAIR JUROR

Start Up Art Fair
Los Angeles
2026

A man with long, curly gray hair, wearing a black hat with a shiny band, earrings, and a dark shirt, in a crowd.

Max Presneill

Max Presneill is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles, originally from London, UK. 

A painter with works that explore mortality, existential drive, class & political sub-texts, tribalism, sub-cultural iconography and masculine identity, he has exhibited throughout the world including Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, Istanbul, Sydney, Beijing, Tokyo and elsewhere, and is represented by Patrick Painter, Inc, Mark Moore Fine Art, as well as the Durden & Ray collective in Los Angeles. He is also represented by TW Fine Art in Brisbane, Australia, GCC Arte Contemporaneo in Merida, Mexico, The Farm & Distillery in Berlin  and also works with ICFA in Beijing, Gallery Lara, Tokyo, S Gallery (LA and South Korea) and Shatto Gallery (LA). His work has also been shown at art fairs including The Armory Show (NYC), The Stray Show (Chicago), The Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Hong Kong Art Fair, Clavo Art Fair (Mexico City) the Los Angeles Art Show, Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm), QiPO (Mexico City) and Miami Projects (Miami) and in both the Yokohama Triennial and 13th Istanbul Biennial parallel events. 

As a Curator he is currently the Director and Head Curator of the Torrance Art Museum, with particular curatorial interests in artist-led projects, emerging art, new models for curatorial methodologies and an international scope for partnerships, exchanges and building artistic communities. CBS Television named him in the top 8 Best Art Curators in Los Angeles (2015) and  Modern Painters magazine included him in the 2018 Top 25 Curators to Watch from around the world, alongside colleagues from the Guggenheim, MOMA, Whitney, Tate, LACMA and other institutions. He is an Ambassador for the Artist-Run Alliance, as well as a member of a number of professional organizations, including the American Association of Art Curators, American Association of Museums, California Association of Museums and others. He has been honored by the City of Torrance for Excellence in Art on 2 occasions. 

More recently he has developed and presented NOMAD (the largest pop-up exhibition in US history in 2021-current), and ULTRA! - a large scale public-art festival of contemporary art (2021), The ScandiLA exchanges (between artist-run spaces in Sweden and Los Angeles), and the B-LA-Connect series of exchanges between artist-run spaces in Berlin and Los Angeles (2019-22), and similarly, BLAM which links artist-run spaces in Berlin, Los Angeles and Mexico City. He is also currently the Curatorial Director of TRYST (the world’s largest international art fair for artist-run spaces, in Los Angeles). Over the course of his curatorial career he has curated more than 500 exhibitions, both in Los Angeles and worldwide, in Museums and commercial & alternative galleries, as well as occasional non-art locations.