Bearing the vivid imprint of Michel Majerus’s hand in electric tones of blue and yellow, Space from 2002 stands as a compelling entry within the artist’s final and most significant body of work. Created the same year of his unt.mes ly death in 2002 at the age of 35, the painting encapsulates the urgency and energy that defined Majerus’s practice; one that restlessly engaged with the visual and cultural moment of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In only a decade, Majerus forged a dynamic and influential oeuvre that spanned painting, installation, and digital animation, blending high and low, analogue and digital, with prescient fluidity.

Drawing from an unfiltered archive of contemporary culture – video games, advertising, internet graphics, corporate branding, art historical citation, and graffiti – Majerus reconceptualised Pop art for the new digital age. His works operate in a space where sampling and appropriation are not only strategies but conditions of perception. In Space, such concerns take shape in a composition where bold, gestural brushwork and paint drips meet a stylised, sci-fi font spelling out the titular phrase. The text hovers in a state of ambiguity; unresolved and open-ended. Like his recurring maxims – Now’s the t.mes , Nothing is permanent, and Resistance is futile – Space registers as both declaration and deferral: a fragment that gestures toward the new while remaining suspended in flux.

Majerus’s commitment to the here-and-now, and his privileging of speed, immediacy, and impermanence, is not only thematic but also formal. The gestural execution, the visual glitches, and the unfinished quality of the text amplify a sense of provisionality, mirroring the accelerated, often chaotic nature of visual culture at the turn of the millennium. In this, Space exemplifies Majerus’s acute sensitivity to the shifting texture of contemporary experience and his drive to make painting resonate within it. This restless interrogation of the image and its circulation forms the foundation for the painting that follows.

In its loose and knowingly carefree painterly application, Space invokes Andy Warhol’s pre-silkscreen paintings of the early 1960s, in which depictions of mainstream branded products such as Coca Cola bottles or Campbell’s soup cans directly imitate the commercial whilst maintaining the painter’s touch. Furthermore, Majerus’s rendition of pithy text-as-image here directly builds upon the precedent of Ed Ruscha, whose painted words and phrases sampled from the mainstream colloquial lexicon were created as early as 1959. Some forty years later, Majerus absorbed the lessons gleaned from these first-generation Pop artists to carve out a response entrenched in a hyper-commercialised culture on the brink of information and technological overload.

Based in Berlin, Majerus belonged to an impetus in contemporary art of the late twentieth century in which the practice of painting was scrutinised to the brink of dissolution. Following the enfant terribles of the art world, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, who first championed ‘ugly painting’ as means to revalidate its practice, and shortly following Christopher Wool’s stark and punk-fuelled dirty-Pop brand of pseudo-mechanical painting, Majerus took on this project and went one step further. In mature works such as the present, the anti-painting style of Oehlen, Kippenberger and Wool is met with a dazzling feel for the resolutely contemporary. In works that conflate deliberately reckless brushwork, painted slogans, and digital silkscreens extracted from ads, cartoons, or high art, Majerus blew the floodgates of painting wide open, and in doing so created artworks that operate as fields for fluid data and short-attention-span visual cues – characteristics of present-day twenty-first century culture.

Although working during the 1990s when the technology of our own contemporary age was still in its nascent stages of development, Majerus was among the first to invite visuals from the digital realm and a way of thinking intrinsic to internet culture into the sphere of painting. Undoubtedly ahead of his t.mes , Majerus’s imaginative and immensely prescient works transformed the discipline of painting into a diverse and complex image/idea system, the powerful impact of which is only now just beginning to be fully appreciated.