MICHEL MAJERUS
2015-12-07Born in Luxembourg, Majerus lived and worked in Berlin until a 2002 plane crash tragically ended his life at the age of thirty-five. Majerus’s work often features text and graphics sampled from a diverse range of sources. The exhibition’s largest work, overdose (1997), presents a conglomeration of brightly-colored graphics on a monumental scale, depicting laundry detergent packaging, an ice cream wrapper, a club flyer, and Woody from the animated film Toy Story, a recurring character in Majerus’s work. Painted on fifteen panels, overdose is nearly sixteen feet tall by twenty-three feet wide, filling a wall of the gallery from floor to ceiling.
MoM Block Nr. 56 (1999) includes a reproduction of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, itself a blend of sampled graphics and gestural brushwork. By adding his own strokes, Majerus has transformed Basquiat and Warhol’s painting into an irreverent three-part collaboration.
From 2000 to 2001 Majerus lived in Los Angeles for a year. One of the paintings he made here, pornography needs you (2001), is included in the exhibition. On the nearly ten-by-eleven-foot canvas, a handful of five-pointed stars, like those on the American flag or the Hollywood Walk of Fame, accompanies the titular phrase as it tips down and over the painting’s bottom edge.
Exhibition runs through to January 9th, 2016
Matthew Marks Gallery
1062 North Orange Grove
90046 Los Angeles
USA
