Michel Majerus' Complex Oeuvre on view at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

Written by Bernard Silverman Sunday, 13 May 2012 22:44

STUTTGART. - Michel Majerus only lived to the age of thirty-five and nevertheless the artist left behind a complex and comprehensive oeuvre. In a creative period of just ten years he produced a unique statement about painting that remains relevant today. Majerus worked with diverse techniques and varied subjects and motifs taken from the realm of computers, comics, and advertising. At the same time he made use of art history, drawing on works by artists such as Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and other representatives of Pop Art and Minimal Art. With his sampling method of combining various elements in a free and nonhierarchical manner, he created his own world of imagery and thereby gave painting an important impulse. Because of his works’ large size and their installation character, very few museums have been able to show them in all their complexity. From November 26, 2011 to April 9, 2012 the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart fills this gap with a comprehensive exhibition of more than one hundred of the artist’s paintings and installations, including works on loan from Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Stuttgart.

The Stuttgart exhibition returns the work of Michel Majerus to its starting point: from 1986 to 1992 the artist studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart with, among others, K. R. H. Sonderborg and Joseph Kosuth. Afterward he went to Berlin and lived for a year in Los Angeles. Prior to his death in 2002 he participated in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad and today is represented in museums and private collections around the world. Since the generous size of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart’s ground floor and basement galleries—with their high and long walls—accommodate Michel Majerus’s expan-sive works particularly well this special exhibition will be the first that is not presented in the Cube. The resulting spatial opportunities enable the exhibition to show the range of Majerus’s multifaceted oeuvre, from the early works of his Stuttgart period to those he produced while living in Los Angeles. Furthermore, on more than 2,500 square meters the alternation of concentrated and open areas offers surprising views and perspectives that impressively convey Majerus’s handling of space—a central subject in his artistic creation.


In order to realize his ideas, Majerus drew on a wide repertoire of methods and techniques: besides acrylic painting on canvas he made use of silkscreen printing, collage, and neon and video works or computer-generated prints and created works on aluminum, PVC, and wood in addition to large-format murals. His mix of completely different painting techniques and his penchant to freely combine art-historical references with the most diverse picture motifs from the consumer world of logos, slogans, icons, and quotations from comics demonstrate Michel Majerus’s nonhierarchical approach to imagery. In the process he very consciously used the technological and cultural developments of the early twenty-first century: »I enjoy making art in the 1990s because it’s now possible to pursue work that isn’t preoccupied with lingering too long at one particular point. "He justified the use of the latest technological means and opportunities such as computers, Photoshop, and beamers as being" as eco-nomically effective as possible« and enabling him to produce in a timesaving manner. These procedural methods also reflect Majerus’s interest in contemporary iconography, popular art, and youth culture. With his multilayered, side-by-side and overlapping of styles and motifs he responded to the flood of pictures from mass-media society and in the Internet.

Michel Majerus integrated numerous art-historical quotations in his oeuvre. Along with highlighting his references to Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Color Field Painting the Stuttgart exhibition exemplifies this with Majerus’s reception of Frank Stella’s paintings. The selection of works demonstrates the multifaceted way in which Majerus assimilated the older artist’s work. Some pieces transform a fragment from one of Stella’s paintings into an autonomous picture subject; others give equal status to comic characters, Stella motifs, and figures derived from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s pictorial language.

In addition to this thematic room dedicated to art-historical references, the exhibition also focuses on the artist’s early and late work. The two »Stuttgart Rooms« present for the first time works Majerus produced while a student at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste. Chiefly small format paintings and prints will be on view here.

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