Michel Majerus, gemälde (Installation View), neugerriemschneider, Berlin, November 8, 2022 – January 14, 2023 © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe
This winter in Berlin, neugerriemschneider is printing a dynamic show by Michel Majerus – gemälde, 1994. The show recreates gemälde, the first exhibition in the gallery’s collaboration with Michel Majerus in 1994, and is her reconstructed for the first time as part of an ongoing focus on the artist by the gallery this year. The historic exhibition will be reconstructed to scale and includes the same works it originally showed, evoking the inception of Majerus’ innovative artistic method, which presented a new way of approaching painting and making it accessible in the form of installations.
Michel Majerus, gemälde (Installation View), neugerriemschneider, Berlin, November 8, 2022 – January 14, 2023 © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe
Few artists took the language and discourse of pop into the digital era in the way that Majerus did over the course of his career, taking graphics, logos, and dense gestural brushstrokes into a new engagement with the hyper-populated image landscape of the 1990’s. His works filled the canvas with advertising language and comic-book aesthetics, calling to mind the kinetic canvases of James Rosenquist, and updating them for an era where the graphic arts had pervaded the landscape of consumer culture in new ways.
Michel Majerus, gemälde (Installation View), neugerriemschneider, Berlin, November 8, 2022 – January 14, 2023 © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe
gemälde was first exhibited at neugerriemschneider in 1994, when the gallery had just opened and was still located at Goethestrasse 73 in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Majerus was both responding to and disrupting the spatial framework of the gallery by integrating a doorway in his wall paintings, taking up another wall in full with a monumental canvas and situating viewers themselves within this visual space. References to popular culture were combined with text fragments and art-historical allusions. Majerus expanded his wall works by bringing the streetscape into the gallery space, thus tracing a path both metaphorical and literal along which his installation unfolds.
Michel Majerus, gemälde (Installation View), neugerriemschneider, Berlin, November 8, 2022 – January 14, 2023 © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe
Here, re-created in the gallery, the show does a remarkable job of emphasizing Majerus’s vital and expressive body of work, years of ahead of its time in both staging and framing the disparate techniques he incorporated into his canvases and built-environments. The show closes January 14th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Michael Majerus: gemälde [Exhibition View]
