Marc Brandenburg
dal 26/11/2010 al 14/1/2011
Segnalato da
26/11/2010
Marc Brandenburg
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Villa Kast, Salzburg
Isolated Imagery. Brandenburg's almost spectrally delicate pencil drawings seem like negatives of snapshots from a bizarre parallel world. His realistic scenes with public demonstrators, flag-waving football fans, clowns and fairgrounds, his portraits of friends and relatives, his water fountains and monumentally over-inflated Christmas decorations have an unsettlingly threatening effect.
We take pleasure in announcing our third solo exhibition of works by the
Berlin-based artist Marc Brandenburg. Entitled Isolated Imagery, it
coincides with his major retrospective Deutsch-Amerikanische
Freundschaft [German-American Friendship] in the Denver Art Museum,
on show until 20 February 2011.
At first glance, Brandenburg's almost spectrally delicate pencil drawings
seem like negatives of snapshots from a bizarre parallel world. His
realistic scenes with public demonstrators, flag-waving football fans,
clowns and fairgrounds, his portraits of friends and relatives, his water
fountains and monumentally over-inflated Christmas decorations have
an unsettlingly threatening effect. The silvery, shiny materiality of the
graphite surfaces is combined with finely-nuanced, gently tapering
contours. Everything is bathed in a blaze of unreal light. The motifs on
the white paper seem deprived of their original peaceful character.
Brandenburg "examines in drawing the masks and symbols of a ruthless event culture: the ritual
masquerading of football fans, the chubby bodies of fairground figures and mascots, the slogans and
symbols on pennants, banners and hoardings" (Oliver Koerner von Gustorf). He draws from his own
photographs, which attempt to capture the moment of veering from one motif to another. What
concerns him is the interval between them: "It's like a cut in film, or individual stills that make up a film.
It's like trying to depict an aura," Brandenburg explained recently in an interview.
In his speech at the award of the 2005 Karl Ströher Prize to Marc Brandenburg in the Frankfurt
Museum of Modern Art, Ulf Poschardt remarked that although Brandenburg stands in the tradition of
Pop and its delight in the surface itself, he still combines the aspects of realism and transfiguration in a
contemporary manner. Poschardt also said that "it was not so much the media world and its images
that Brandenburg captured, but moments of experienced intensity. A timid viewer (and aren't we all,
when faced with delicate, intimate drawings?) has the feeling that he is looking at the negatives of
snapshots of a deeply-felt life. The refined technical skill of Marc Brandenburg's work perpetuates the
snapshot. The moment was given permanence. The shock of the moment has been lastingly sketched
in." There is an evident affinity with the 19th-century genre and history painter Adolf von Menzel,
whom Brandenburg greatly admires. Also Berlin Neue Sachlichkeit [new objectivity] painters such as
Otto Dix and George Grosz can be seen as precursors of Brandenburg.
Brandenburg's iconography often draws on scenes showing loss of control and extremes of
corporeality. In 1998 Diedrich Diederichsen, writing about Brandenburg's aesthetics of excess, said
that the visual grammar of excess is essentially that of an accelerated or accelerating change of
images which are in themselves clearly contoured. Their smallest element is the stroboscopic flash,
alternately bright and darkened images where the bright parts produce a sequence of their own; this is
then excessively bright, leaping out aggressively at the viewer, yet kept at a distance by the dark
interruptions, the effect of immediate proximity thus being mitigated. Brandenburg's drawings endow
this experience of the world with intensity and permanence.
Born in Berlin in 1965, Brandenburg grew up in Texas and Germany. In the early 1990s he shot to
fame with his forceful graphite drawings, and within a very short time he rose to the top league of the
young German art scene. Today, his works are included in collections such as that of MoMA/New
York, German Bank, Berlin Copper Engraving Museum, Hamburg Kunsthalle and Frankfurt Museum of
Modern Art, and have been exhibited in international museums, most recently (2009/2010) in the
group exhibitions The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing (Hayward Gallery/London, Middlesbrough
Institute of Modern Art, The Bluecoat/Liverpool, City Museum and Art Gallery/Bristol and Fruitmarket
Gallery/Edinburgh), Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation
Contemporary Drawings Collection (MoMA/New York) and Linie Line Linea (Kunstmuseum/Bonn).
For 2011 the Hamburg Kunsthalle and Studio Museum/Harlem, in collaboration with the Goethe
Institut/New York, plan comprehensive solo exhibitions of works by Marc Brandenburg.
For further information please contact:
Dr. Arne Ehmann +43 662 881 393 17 arne.ehmann@ropac.at
To obtain pictures, please contact office@ropac.at
Image: Marc Brandenburg, Untiteld, 2010
© Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris · Salzburg
Foto: Jochen Littkemann, 2010.
Opening November 27th, 2010, 7:30 pm
Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg
Mirabellplatz 2 - Salzburg
Hours: Tues-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 10am-2pm
free admission