Max Friedlander

A CERAMICS exhibition in Chalk Farm next month will be dedicated to the artists’ son, who died from a brain tumour at the age of 33.

Uri and Cordula Friedlander’s ceramic sculptures and pottery are not just inspired by their eldest boy, Max, but thanks to him – it was Max who first introduced his parents to clay when he gifted them a weekend pottery workshop eight years ago.

Called “Connections”, the exhibition at The Gallery in Regent’s Park Road is about the invisible threads of fate and “the strange things that happen to direct us in life”.

It includes Uri and Cordula’s work from the point of Max’s shock diagnosis four years ago to his death two years later.

“The work we are exhibiting is from that whole painful period,” said Uri, Max’s father, whose ceramic sculptures include graceful, limbless torsos and disembodied, giant internal organs.

He added: “When Max was first diagnosed, they had all these MRI diagnostic pictures from inside his head, inside his body.

“When you see [the sculptures], this is expressing a lot of what I was experiencing during that time.”

Above and below: some of the works in the exhibition

Uri has a background in medical engineering, making robotics for use in hospitals.

“If I could have made parts for him, I would have done it,” he added.

Uri and Cordula are both designers who graduated from the Royal College of Art, but they had not worked with clay before Max introduced them to it.

“Design is quite a restrictive platform, because you have to adhere to the client’s demands,” Uri said.

“Clay is completely different. You completely free yourself, and try to express your feelings in this material. You can knead it. You feel your hand’s pressure on it, and it’s tactile so you work with your fingers much more than your head.

“It is a rehabilitation material. I think that people with clay basically don’t need psychiatry anymore.

“We got completely hooked on this material and started to work in earnest.”

Max was born in 1991 with Neurofibromatosis, a condition likened to the “Sword of Damocles”, in that it can cause tumours to grow inside the body at random locations and times.

He was an architect, who trained at UCL’s Bartlett and then worked for firms including Richard Rogers and Seth Stein.

“He was extremely charitable and inclusive. He was quite a unique person – even now, we hear on a daily basis the things that he did to help people without us ever knowing.” said Uri.

Max’s younger brother, Louis, recalled his “charisma and easy smile”.

In a written tribute, he said: “We remember him as you do: a romantic, an artist, a cheeky grin, a dash of the rebel, and a leather jacket.”

Max Friedlander was born with neurofibromatosis

Max, his wife and their little girl, Elena, had lived with his parents in Belsize Park until the whole family moved to Bucharest for Max’s treatment during the last year of his life.

He had a second little girl just six months before he died.

“We were with him the whole way through,” his father said, adding that the loss “does not pass with time”.

All proceeds from the exhibition will go to Maggie’s, an organisation that works alongside the NHS to provide holistic support to cancer-sufferers and their families.

Its centres, including one at the Royal Free where Max was a patient, are designed by architects on the basis that calm, beautiful spaces are a welcome respite from clinical hospital environments.

Connections will be at 157 Regent’s Park Road, NW1 8BB, from November 20 to November 22, 10am-6pm. See more of Uri and Cordula’s work @belsize_kiln