Michel Majerus

Biography

In 2000, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, visitors could skate across a painting. Michel Majerus had covered the surface of a half-pipe with fragments of text and overlapping ovals, and while the exhibition ran, the ramp was rarely empty. Its size is given differently: 370 or 455 square metres. Either way, it is his largest work.

He was born on 9 June 1967 in Esch-sur-Alzette, in Luxembourg. In 1986 he entered the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and graduated in 1992. That same year, with fellow students Nader, Stephan Jung, Susa Reinhardt and Wawa Tokarski, he co-founded the group 3K-NH; the name was formed from the initials of their nicknames. The group exhibited in Stuttgart and Berlin. In 1993 Majerus and Jung moved to Berlin.

From 1994 he was represented by the Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider, which still looks after his estate. For his first show there he asked for a road to be paved inside the small exhibition space. Painting was the medium he preferred, but he took material from everywhere: computer games, television, pop music, trademarks and corporate logos, the work of other artists. A single canvas could hold a Super Mario figure, a portrait of Marilyn Manson and broad brushstrokes in the manner of Willem de Kooning. The influence of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat is evident. In an untitled painting of 1996, Warhol’s “Skull” appears in the colours characteristic of Gerhard Richter. From 1996 he worked on the MoM Block series, more than 170 canvases; MoM stands for Modehaus Mitte, a former fashion factory in East Berlin where he had his studio for a time. International attention came in 1996 after an exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Stuttgart, followed by shows in Münster and Dundee. In 1998 he took part in Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg: a huge painting hung in the foyer of a cinema, in which a giant sneaker was met by waves in pop colours. In 1999 Szeemann invited him to the Venice Biennale, where he decorated the outer façade of the pavilion with a collage of text and image, “Sun in 10 different directions”.

His painting increasingly became a space. In 2000, through the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), he went to Los Angeles and began a series of large canvases incorporating digital media and animation; by other accounts this was in 2001. He finished the series in Berlin; nine of the works made up the exhibition “Pop Reloaded”. It had urban clutter, billboards along the freeway, office towers, references to Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko and Richter, and beside them a video of his signature, constantly changing. To my mind, this is his most honest joke about fame.

In 2002, at the Neugerriemschneider gallery, he showed the installation “controlling the moonlight maze”: a metal frame spanned the room and enclosed four paintings on different supports in different techniques. At the same time, he installed a life-size photograph of a Brutalist social housing block in front of the Brandenburg Gate, while the other side of the gate was taken over by Thomas Bayrle. He was preparing an exhibition, “Project Space”, for Tate Liverpool.

On 6 November 2002 Majerus was killed in a plane crash: the Luxair aircraft flying from Berlin to Luxembourg came down on approach to landing. His work has since been shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2003), Tate Liverpool (2004), the Kunsthaus Graz (2005) and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2011); in 2022 his first museum survey in the United States opened at the ICA Miami.