Michel Majerus

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 

Private Collection (acquired from the above by the present owner in 2014, and sold: Sotheby's New York, 17 May 2018, Lot 497)

Private Asian Collection (acquired directly from the above sale)  

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紐約，Matthew Marks畫廊

私人收藏（2014年直接購自上述畫廊；售於：紐約，蘇富比，2018年5月17日，拍品編號497）

亞洲私人收藏（直接購自上述拍賣）

Paul Dell, ed., Michel Majerus: Progressive Aesthetics, Luxembourg 2013, fig. 112, p. 121, illustrated in color

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Paul Dell編，〈米榭・馬耶魯斯:進步美學〉（盧森堡，2013年）圖112，頁121，載彩圖

“Majerus’s production of images and visual environments, in fact, represents one of the very few recent approaches to painting that cannot be understood in terms of a return to anything from the past. His art had a specific kind of newness – not the lofty, if contested, 'originality of the avant-garde', but the prepackaged newness of the latest cell-phone graphic or just-released sneaker from Nike. Majerus's art was about this newness.”—Daniel Birnbaum, “Search Engine. The Art of Michel Majerus”, Artforum, 2006, online

Bursting with a myriad of symbols and referencing the unmistakable visual vocabulary of Jean-Michel Basquiat, o.T. (collaboration Nr. 8) is a fantastic example of Michel Majerus’ inventive artistic language that draws upon art historical precedents and elements from pop culture. Aged only 35 at the time of his untimely death in 2002, the Luxembourgish artist engaged in a highly diverse range of media during his short decade-long career—including painting, large-scale installation and animation—while finding inspiration from a multitude of sources, such as characters from Pixar animations, brand logos, sneaker ads, phrases from youth subcultures, techno, cartoons, video games and quotations from paintings by De Kooning and Basquiat. The present work employs Basquiat’s signature anatomical figure of a King as the focal point of the composition, set against what appears to be the blue and white logo of General Electric. Around the central character, Majerus includes crossed-out words in the style of Basquiat’s script, and a painterly strip of a startling cyan blue.

Based in Berlin, Majerus belonged to an impetus in contemporary art of the late twentieth-century in which the practice of painting was scrutinised to the brink of dissolution. A little after Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen first championed ‘ugly painting’ as means to revalidate its practice, and shortly following Christopher Wool’s stark and punk-fuelled dirty-Pop brand of pseudo-mechanical painting, Majerus took on this project and went one step further. In works such as the present that conflate deliberately reckless brushwork, painted slogans, and digital silkscreens extracted from ads, cartoons, or high art, Majerus blew the floodgates of painting wide-open, and in doing so created artworks that operate as fields for fluid data and short-attention span visual cues – characteristics of present-day twenty-first century culture.

Undoubtedly ahead of his time, Majerus’s imaginative and immensely prescient works transformed the discipline of painting into a diverse and complex image/idea system, the powerful impact of which is only now just beginning to be fully appreciated. Testament to the significance of Majerus as a canonical figure of the 1990s, several major institutions have organised posthumous exhibitions for the artist, including Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Tate Liverpool, UK; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany.

「馬耶魯斯創造的圖像或視覺環境，其實代表了近年在繪畫領域中甚少出現的方向，這個方向無法透過『回溯過去』這種尋常的思路來理解。他的藝術具備了一種特殊的新意，若要深究，那並不是高高在上的『前衛獨創性』，反而像是預製的最新手機動畫、或剛推出的Nike運動鞋給人的新鮮感——馬耶魯斯的藝術正是包含了這種讓人耳目一新的感覺。」

丹尼爾・伯恩鮑姆，〈搜索引擎：米榭・馬耶魯斯的藝術〉，《Artforum》2006年，網上資源

本作每個角落都充滿了象徵符號，各種視覺元素令人聯想到已故知名藝術家巴斯基亞，它完美示範了馬耶魯斯在藝術史和流行文化啟發下而發展出的獨特語彙。這位盧森堡藝術家在2002年不幸離世時年僅35歲，在短短十年的創作生涯裡，他涉獵過大量媒材，包括繪畫、大型裝置及動畫，靈感來源涵蓋彼思動畫人物、品牌標誌、運動鞋廣告、年輕人次文化用語、Techno電子音樂、卡通、電子遊戲以及德庫寧和巴斯基亞的畫作。本作中央頭戴皇冠的解剖人體正是巴斯基亞的拿手標誌，背景中顯示著通用電氣公司的藍白商標。馬耶魯斯模仿巴斯基亞的風格，在人體周圍寫下字詞，再逐一劃掉，並在畫面右方塗上一道醒目的水藍色顏料。

馬耶魯斯生前主要在柏林進行創作。二十世紀末，繪畫的定義受到前所未有的挑戰，乃至幾乎潰不成軍，馬耶魯斯在那樣的大環境下，扮演了推動當代藝壇發展的角色。馬丁・基本伯格和阿爾伯特・爾萊恩首先提倡「壞畫」，希望藉此重振繪畫的地位。克里斯托弗・塢爾隨後也在他的偽機械畫中，展現出冷酷無情、充滿混亂和龐克感的普普風格。馬耶魯斯在這些藝術家的影響下，開始著手創作包括本作在內的繪畫，甚至更進一步。他故意混合粗莽的筆觸、手寫的口號、數碼廣告中的絲印碎片、通俗卡通和高級藝術，為繪畫領域打開一個全新的宣洩口，並衍生出與二十一世紀當代文化潮流不謀而合的作品——它們有如流動數據的載體，當中的視覺元素還體貼地迎合了如今大眾短暫的注意力。

毋容置疑，馬耶魯斯超越了他身處的時代，他的作品富含想像力和前瞻性，促使畫壇湧現出更加複雜多元的視覺表現方式和創作概念，這種變化所帶來的強烈衝擊，直至今日才開始得到廣泛討論及認可。多個大型藝術機構曾在馬耶魯斯死後為他舉辦紀念展，例如德國柏林漢堡車站美術館、斯圖加特國家美術館、英國利物浦泰特藝術館及奧地利格拉茨美術館，可見他在1990年代的藝術界舉足輕重的地位。