Michel Majerus at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Matthew Marks Gallery presents the most comprehensive exhibition of Michel Majerus’ work in the United States, and the first in this country since his death in 2002. The exhibition includes over twenty-five paintings and multimedia installations by the late Berlin-based artist, whose promising career was cut short by a plane crash at age 35. Majerus references popular culture and art history, playing with canonical styles alongside graphics borrowed from youth subcultures and the commercial mainstream. Majerus is an example of what art historian Daniel Birnbaum calls “painting in the expanded field,” with a vast oeuvre, prepackaged newness and hybrid spaces of the Information Age. By incorporating the visual vocabularies of ‘next-generation’ technologies and 1990s consumer culture, Majerus expands on the appropriation art of the 1980s through his pioneering use of digital methods of production, altering the very space of representation itself. Photo Elise Gallant