Michel Majerus (1967-2002)

‘Majerus does not mourn the death of painting, but instead celebrates the abundance of imagery accumulated throughout the history of art, and generated today with increasing speed by the media and new information technologies. The temporality of his works is that of a floating and all-encompassing Now, analogous, perhaps, to that of the World Wide Web’ (D. Birnbaum, quoted in ‘The Power of Now’, in frieze, Issue 34, May 1997).

This energetic ensemble of paintings by Michael Majerus, comprising expressionistic abstraction, digitised text and graphic design, is a considered, glorifying immortalisation of popular culture in the Information Age. Taking cues from an assorted visual history, Majerus appropriates sources from billboards and contemporary commodities, 1990s video games, and contemporary graphic design, emblematised here by the bold rush of ‘DIGITAL’, the glitchy condescension of ‘newcomer’, and the psychedelic warmth of a flower. Majerus juxtaposes found media alongside painted homages to modernist masters, casting the artist as a postmodern arbitrator with his mosaic-like designs of twentieth-century visual cross-pollination. Rooted in a corporate and commercial aesthetic encapsulating millennial digitalisation, Merjus updates the sentiment of 1960s Pop whilst championing the longevity of painting in a technophilic celebration.