Rachel Maxi
Rachel Maxi is a Seattle-based artist working across painting, sculpture, and mixed media. For the first two decades of her career, she was known for representational paintings of urban landscapes and still life—work she described as “the diary of the mundane,” grounded in careful observation, composition, and the rendering of light.
A life-altering accident in 2015 marked a decisive shift in her practice. In the years that followed, Maxi developed a new visual language—one that moves beyond representation into a more intuitive, materially driven approach. Shaped in part by artist residencies spanning from Morocco to the American West, this body of work unfolds as a coded, immersive field of memory, place, and perception.
Maxi’s practice is rooted in direct engagement with the world. Beginning with daily walks, she gathers visual and physical fragments—color, light, plant life, urban textures, and found materials—which are carried into the studio. There, painting and constructed elements converge. Works develop without fixed plans, guided instead by an internal logic of balance, tension, and response, where material, color, and form continuously shift in relation to one another.
Her work reflects an ongoing investigation into how we inhabit and remember space—culturally, emotionally, and spiritually. Landscapes, both natural and built, are reconfigured through a process that is at once intuitive and exacting, resulting in compositions that feel at once familiar and unplaceable.
Maxi was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and received her education at Xavier University. She has lived and worked in Seattle since 1990, with over three decades of exhibition history across the Pacific Northwest, including presentations at the Seattle Art Museum and Tacoma Art Museum. Her work is widely collected in both public and private collections.