Michel Majerus was only 35 years old when, in November 2002, the propeller plane that was supposed to take him from Berlin, where he lived and worked, to his native Luxembourg crashed just before landing. At the end of the 1980s he began his studies at the Stuttgart Art Academy with K. R. H. Sonderborg and, after the wonderfully unwieldy Sonderborg had been dismissed, continued with his successor Joseph Kosuth.
Majerus thus internalized two artistic worlds, two diametrically opposed strategies. With calculated ease, he succeeded in transforming Kosuth’s pointed conceptual and textual art with Sonderborg’s painterly gesture and spontaneity.
On the 20th anniversary of Michel Majerus’ death, the Luxembourg Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean organized a symposium under the direction of the new director Bettina Steinbrügge. Parallel to the increasingly demanding art fair Luxembourg Art Week, the large oeuvre of the internationally most successful Luxembourg artist was discussed and changes in reception were analyzed.
Last but not least, the importance of Majerus was named: the position of a young artist who, at the time, was on the threshold of digital possibilities and challenges that were admittedly unimagined but extremely fascinating to him.
This meeting marked the beginning of a spectacular series of exhibitions that will run from Berlin, Hamburg and Hanover to Munich, Stuttgart and Luxembourg until the end of 2023. In the artist’s former Berlin studio – now the seat of the Michel Majerus Estate managed by Galerie Neugerriemschneider – a room installation with works by Sonderborg, neon quotes by Kosuth and text fragments and slivers of thought from Majerus’ apparently inexhaustible notebooks refers to this connection cultivated with great respect .
Caring for an estate and keeping the artistic heritage alive is the duty of the gallery owner who is involved, and it is also a worthwhile one if they are good at it. This can succeed, as has been shown: the Majerus revival was set in motion with an apparently flawless network of lenders, curators and museum directors.
Neugerriemschneider is currently restaging Majerus’ first space-filling appearance – in 1994 it took place in the newly opened Berlin gallery (then in Charlottenburg’s Goethestrasse). The paintings, which fill the wall and room, use the world of comics and impress with the bold brushstrokes of American expressionists.
With the road surface, the urban landscape was brought into the interior, boundaries were radically abolished. The grandiose (grandios thought) start for two ambitious gallery owners and an artist who, as it turned out, worked tirelessly, was made.
For Michel Majerus, working meant constantly examining and sampling signs and gestures typical of the time in his environment, be it in Stuttgart, New York or Berlin. It meant a continuous, meticulous reflection on art-historical events and turns that were apt to deliver consistent results. They appeared in shorthand citations in his works, sometimes enigmatically alienated, sometimes mockingly and openly.
Majerus fascinated the internet, in the 90s it was still a vague promise. The digital world was just about good as a fairly limited and, in the opinion of many, a short-lived tool for secretaries and accountants. Well, maybe for gaming.
And Majerus was a gamer! Super Mario, Roger Rabbit were his on-screen companions, who effortlessly found their way into his oversized works, ignoring breaches of copyright taboos. As a Berlin artist, he was particularly interested in the world of techno. However, he was no raver, much more a monastic observer with a crystal-clear mind, curious, gifted with adaptation.
His meteoric rise at the time naturally led him to insights into and views of the art market, which he did not at all shamefully ignore in a moralizing manner, but rather appreciated and served in his own way as an artist in his meanwhile also very successful gallery. His artistic career peaked in 2001 when he participated in the Venice Biennale, curated by Harald Szeemann, where he designed the facade of the central pavilion.
The following year, Majerus veiled the Brandenburg Gate with a huge likeness of the so-called Pallasseum, a block of concrete blocks in Berlin Schöneberg. It was built on the site of the sports palace demolished in 1973 as a prime example of urban living, but by then it had long been notorious as a social hotspot.
With this brilliant, albeit unexpectedly political statement, Majerus embarked on a new path. Incidentally, the Pallasseum with its strenuous milieu was to be demolished in the meantime; it has been a listed building since 2017.
The Luxembourg symposium was attended by predominantly young speakers who looked at the artist’s work from their time – with the greatest respect for and astonishment at Majerus’ impact, legibility and importance to this day and probably beyond. The listeners were young, the motto of the symposium “What looks good today may not look good tomorrow” comes, like the sentences in Michel Majerus’ works, from the notebooks of the pushing forward doubter who absorbed as much as possible.
The question in the room was how he would have positioned himself in a world that was constantly changing at breakneck speed. It is quite possible that today he would have pushed the digital world aside as a triviality that had long since been told.
The artist Majerus was certainly not a seer, rather he was an analyst. But how fresh his adaptations are, how much fascination his art can enliven and retain to this day, testifies above all to his talent for precise visual perception and the timelessness of his metaphorical imagery.
