November 18, 2005 to January 29, 2006
Michel Majerus (1967 - 2002), the young Luxembourg artist who lost his life in an airplane crash, created an extraordinary body of work. He worked with fragments of the world of comics, advertising or more recent art history, and so became a key figure to a new generation of young, contemporary artists. His thematic concerns are the overlaps of a fast-paced age and expresses them multilayeredly and with exceptional verve. The constant oscillation in his work between painting and installation integrates the new world of imagery from digital media as well as art-historical allusions to the repertoire of Minimal Art and Pop-Art. Paintings of very different sizes are combined with large installations which on the other hand interweave in turn with painting, the world of signets and advertising, as well as with new outer space experiences of the present-day.
For the first time, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg will be showing almost all of the large-scale paintings, up to 10 meters in height and width, which Michel Majerus had created since the early 1990’s. The paintings, with their cinemascope-like formats, are mostly made out of several joined canvases and place the viewer in a universe of diverse quotations and fragments of present-day reality from Mickey Mouse to design objects and Nike running shoes. Twenty-one of these huge paintings will be assembled in the large north Deichtorhalle in a spectacular, painterly mise-en-scène. Due to their sheer size, these paintings can only be exhibited in the Deichtorhallen. There would not have been space for them at hardly any other exhibition hall in Germany. The Deichtorhallen’s spaces with its historical-monument- status, industrial architecture of the early 1900’s offers these unusual pictorial formats a congenial and total-experience facilitating framework.
The large installation „the space is where you’ll find it“, which Michel Majerus created in London in 2000, will be reconstructed as the lead-in piece to the exhibition. Here, the pictures, which are a combination of painting and photography and are digitally printed onto canvases, are fixed onto round and oval elements in space. This allows the viewer’s perception of left and right, forwards and backwards to become blurred and indistinct as if one were in outer space in zero gravity.
After „dokoupil – painting in the 21st century,“ this is the second exhibition in a series of major monographic overviews on the artistic works of central artists of the present who have not been presented to the public in this form until now. This series of exhibitions will certainly determine the program in the large Deichtorhalle to a large extent in the years to come.
Parallel to the exhibition of the large-scale Majerus paintings, a presentation of the overflow of Majerus’ iconography in particular will take place at the kestnergesellschaft . The exhibitions in Hamburg and Hanover are part of an internationally organized Michel Majerus retrospective in which the Kunsthaus Graz, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Museé d’Art Moderne Grand-Duke Jean, Luxembourg are all taking part with different focal points respectively.
