“Ironically, his destiny was to sample and appropriate the entire history of art before himself becoming a legitimate historical reference. But, alive, he was undoubtedly more like a Super Mario moving through history like the levels of a video game, flattening content on the screen of his work, even ‘collaborating’ with deceased artists.”
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. Shortly after Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen first championed ‘ugly painting’ as a means to revalidate the practice, and not long after Christopher Wool developed his stark and punk-fuelled dirty-Pop brand of pseudo-mechanical painting, Majerus took on the 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.
“Majerus does not mourn the death of painting, but instead celebrates the abundance of imagery accumulated throughout the history of art.”
The present work, consisting of six equally-sized canvases, belongs to Majerus’s last and most important body of work. These exemplify Majerus’ engagement not only with the history of art, as visible in Untitled (After Richter) and Hi, but also with many aspects of popular culture, from computer games, digital imagery, film and television. Seen as one, the panels are a visual testimony to the wideness of the artist’s creative scope.
Majerus’s paintings conflate deliberately reckless brushwork, painted slogans, and digital silkscreens extracted from ads, cartoons, or high art to created artworks that operate as fields or fluid data on short-attention span visual cues – characteristics of present-day twenty-first century culture. Aged only 35 at the t.mes
of his unt.mes
ly death in 2002, in only a decade Majerus had brought forth an oeuvre that ran the gamut from painting, installation and animation – grasping visual cues and sampling directly from an un-hierarchical wheelhouse of sources spanning characters from Pixar animations, brand logos, sneaker ads, phrases from youth subcultures, and quotations from paintings by De Kooning and Basquiat.