Michel Majerus - On the road to success with a giant sneaker
Michel Majerus was born on 9th June 1967 in Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg. He studied painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart from 1986 to 1992 under Joseph Kosuth and K. R. H. Sonderburg, among others, where the choice of his teachers, an American conceptual artist and a Danish Art Informel painter, already hinted at the wide range of artistic means of expression that Majerus would pursue in his short career. After completing his studies, he found his adopted home in Berlin, to which he remained loyal apart from a one-year stay in Los Angeles in 2001. Majerus made his artistic breakthrough in the second half of the 1990s, when he caused a sensation with his contributions to Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg: the giant image of a sneaker carried by waves, yet sometimes what is read successfully, stops us with its meaning, no. II, not only went beyond the usual dimensions of painting, but also caused a stir with its presentation in the foyer of a cinema.
A colourful mishmash in a wild creative order
Michel Majerus followed the Pop Art concept that everything that has found its place in everyday culture is also a legitimate subject for the visual arts. In this respect, he had no fear of encounter but drew extensively on set pieces from art history and pop culture. His paintings include video game icons such as Super Mario as well as a portrait of the controversial rock singer Marilyn Manson; his brushstrokes are sometimes reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, then again of Frank Stella or even Georg Baselitz and Wilhelm de Kooning. Majerus took an important step into three-dimensionality in 2000 when, at the invitation of Udo Kittelmann, he created his largest painting on the surface of a half-pipe at the Cologne Kunstverein: the work delighted not only art critics, but also numerous skaters, who used the installation extensively for their own purposes. Majerus' other works were just as lively as the sometimes acrobatic movements of the skaters, virtuously blending all the boundaries between e- and subculture, colourful cartoon characters from Japanese and Western animated films, Teletubbies, speech bubbles, price tags and similar incongruous elements.
Carefully planned chaos as a trademark
At the invitation of curator Harald Szeemann, Michel Majerus designed the exterior façade of the Italian pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 1999 - further evidence of the young artist's increasing international reach, whose supposedly hurled out impulsive explosions of creativity were actually carefully planned and composed pictorial worlds. This composed chaos was a deliberate stylistic device of Michel Majerus, who was also open to the possibilities of digital image processing from the very beginning and used it as a welcome instrument to merge his quotations and reflections. For Majerus, existing images contained the invitation to create something new: art history as an infinite narrative.
Michel Majerus died in a plane crash on 6th November 2002 in Niederanven.
Michel Majerus - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz: