Lot 661 R

The Luxembourgian artist works with quotes and cross-references to the media world and mass culture of the 1990s and relates them to motifs from art history. He uses various techniques for this which are linked together in his large installations and wall paintings producing a mutual effect. ''Throughout his work he subordinates form and colour to a global idea of the contemporary, based on a Pop-influenced - and therefore ambiguous - idea of a dual dominance of the computer monitor and commercial capitalism. This fundamental ambivalence in Majerus' painting is based on his ability to admire the signs of commercial rhetoric and the visual flotsam of the packaging industry, tempered by his belief in the power of art and its ability to open the public's eyes with respect to a toxic environment in which we move. Romance and irony touch and lead to a completely new synthesis: Majerus' art can never decide between the sharpness of a Klippenberger, the influential cult status of Pop Art and the existential commitment of a Basquiat. He manages to keep all of these heterogeneous elements in a kind of precarious balance, to show us the different dimensions of capitalism from visual aggression through alienation and anger to folk poetry.'' (Nicolas Bourriaud, Michel Majerus, Screenshots, in: Ulrike Gross et.al. (ed.), Michel Majerus, exhib.cat. Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart 2012, p.103)