Artist Residency 2016
Marc Brandenburg
The Goethe-Institut in co-operation with Wellington City Council offers artists from Germany a 3 month scholarship to work and live in New Zealand. The artist will reside in Wellington to engage and network with their New Zealand colleagues as well as seeking inspiration for their projects and fostering intercultural dialogue.
Artist in Residence 2016: Marc Brandenburg
Born in Berlin in 1965, Marc Brandenburg grew up in the US and Germany. He lives and works in Berlin. In 2005, Marc Brandenburg was awarded the Karl-Ströher-Prize of the City Frankfurt, he won the scholarship of the senate in Berlin, and was artist in residence in the Villa Romana in Florence, Italy. Marc Brandenburg was awarded the working scholarship of the Kunstfond Bonn e.V. in 2002.
The author Oliver Koerner von Gustorf writes: "Marc Brandenburg combines drawing with spatial, almost filmic experience which takes effect not only in his drawing, but also extends into the third dimension. Since his exhibition Hirnsturm (2002) in the Paul Morris Gallery in New York, where he showed his drawings under black light in a completely black room, he has attempted, in many works and installations, to incorporate the viewer physically in the mental cinema of his drawings, which are always mounted to form a sequence. Brandenburg stages his pictures like a choreography leading from one drawing to the next. What concerns him is what lies in between, what happens when the eye moves from one motif to the next: 'It's a bit like a cut in film, or like the individual frames that make up a film. It's more like trying to depict an aura.'
For his exhibition Normex he developed a huge world of shadows and projections, for which he sampled drawings plotted on transparencies, like film strips. Whereas in the first room, two strips ran round the wall in opposite directions, in the second, black-lit room countless strips created a shimmering, op-art effect – total visual overload. At the same time, in this black-light installation the viewer himself becomes a kind of graphic figure glowing in the dark, surrounded and suffused by hovering images. Brandenburg treats both the drawn and the actual body as a shell, a pictorial space in which images are processed and seen as visions.
At the beginning of the 2000s Marc Brandenburg began producing the motifs of his drawings as transparent stickers in a limited edition. From 2003 he created installations for which he covered windows of bars and museums with hundreds of stickers forming clusters of varying density. In 2009 he designed for the Berlin club Berghain a huge silk-screen collage decorated with sampled drawings of mechanisms from fairground apparatuses, reminiscent of a Rorschach test. Here the body of the picture becomes a resonator, a membrane on which the most diverse images and sensory impressions land. Brandenburg uses the same principle for his temporary tattoos, which he developed for his exhibition Normex. He declares his tattoos – based, like the stickers, on motifs from his drawings – categorically as art, of equal status with his other works. The human body becomes the scene of a mini-retrospective of Brandenburg's works, which can appear anywhere in the city – at traffic lights, in the sauna or in the theatre. At the same time, it is also what the other bodies in Brandenburg's drawings are – a house of images."
Between the 26.02. and 24.04.2016 his works can be seen in the exhibition "Linie Line Linea" at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi in Wellington.
Solo exhibitions (selection):
Zeichnung/ Skulptur/Performance, Museen Stade, 2015
Interior/Exterior, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, 2013
NORMEX, Städtischen Galerie, Wolfsburg, 2012
Zeichnung, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2011
Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, Denver Art Museum, Denver, 2010
Marc Brandenburg Ausstellung, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2005
Hirnsturm, Gallery Paul Morris, New York, 2002
Group exhibitions (selection):
Letztes Jahr in Marienbad, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prag, Tschechische Republik, 2016
Zeichnungsräume, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2016
Zeitgeist-Arte da nova Berlin, CCBB / Goethe-Institut Rio de Janeiro, Brasilien, 2015
Disegno – Zeichenkunst für das 21. Jahrhundert, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden - Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden, 2015
10, Berghain, Berlin, 2014
The Paths of German Art from 1949 to the present, Moscow Museum of Modern Art – MMOMA, Moskau, 2014
Weltreise / Kunst aus Deutschland unterwegs. Werke aus dem Kunstbestand des ifa 1949 bis
heute, ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, 2013
Forever Young. Über den Mythos der Jugend, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 2013
Disaster / The End of Days, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, 2013
The end of the line: Attitudes in drawing, a touring exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London, MIMA Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, City Museum and Art
Gallery, Bristol, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2009-10
compass in hand: selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation contemporary drawings collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009.
Das achte Feld - Geschlechter, Leben und Begehren in der Kunst seit 1960, Museum Ludwig,
Köln, 2006
Heimat als Utopie, Goethe-Institut Tokio, Tokio, Japan, 2006
Moreover, there exist numerous publications by and about Marc Brandenburg. Examples are Vomit, Form, Fictitious Movement by the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in 2008 and various articles in the Art Review, the Tagesspiegel, the Welt am Sonntag, in the Monopol, the N.Y. Times Style Magazin and the Süddeutschen Zeitung.
