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until 18.10. | #4772ARTatBerlin | neugerriemschneider (Linienstrasse) shows from 12. September 2025 (Opening: 11.09.) the exhibition “Noch ein bild” by the artist Michel Majerus.
The eleventh solo exhibition of works by Michel Majerus at neugerriemschneider, noch ein bild, focuses on the artist’s early work and presents a group of small-format paintings from his late student years, some of which are being shown for the first time since their creation. With the carefree expansion of the traditional medium of oil on wood through acrylic colours, unconventional picture supports such as chipboard or plywood, pop-cultural motifs and serial principles, they anticipate central elements of his late practice. The comic-like figures, picture-filling logos, abstract compositions based on repetition and grids and surreal figurative scenes create a whole in the exhibition context that forms the basis for Majerus’ spatial treatment of painting. They testify to a freedom in the selection, combination and installation of images that allowed the artist to create a body of work over the following ten years that anticipates the simultaneity of today’s visual culture.
Michel Majerus, Sleeping, 1992, © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, oil on plywood 20.32 x 40.64 cm
The exhibited paintings were created in the early 1990s, during a transitional phase characterised by Majerus’ move from the Stuttgart State Academy of Fine Arts to the dynamic post-reunification Berlin. With professors K.R.H. Sonderborg and Jo-seph Kosuth as well as like-minded students and a new art scene with off-spaces and progressive events such as the conference “A New Spirit in Curating?” at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the Baden-Württemberg capital offered a fertile environment for Majerus, who even as a student was already engaging with the big names of recent art history and their production techniques on the one hand, and integrating co-operative and conceptual methods into his work on the other.
Early on, he began to draw on images from high culture as well as the pop and everyday world and to treat them as simple compositional elements. Above all, the relationship between motif, technique and image carrier was explored in order to re-contextualise the space through the installative delimitation of painting. While Majerus added screen prints to large lengths of fabric in 1991 and hung them close together in a corridor of the Stuttgart Art Academy, ignoring the existing architecture, he chose leftover wood from a carpenter’s workshop as a picture support for an exhibition with fellow student and fellow artist Susa Reinhardt in a squatted house in Berlin the following year and related the works to each other and to the space through the shared small format.
Part of this group of works is Majerus’ painting Bunte (1992), which is an early example of his extensive use of commercial imagery. It shows the logo of the magazine of the same name, which has catered to the voyeuristic interest of the public for decades. On the landscape-format wooden panel, the sans-serif white capital letters against a red background are also outlined in black and are closer together than in the original, thereby enhancing the visual impact of the motif. In contrast to Bunte, which is painted in acrylic colours, the artist uses oil on plywood for Sleeping (1992). The painting shows a sleeping figure who has had both legs severed at knee height by a smaller figure who is now fleeing with the bloody saw with which he committed the crime.
Michel Majerus, Bunte, 1992, © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, acrylic on wood, 19 x 25.2 cm
The composition is reminiscent of drawings by Wilhelm Busch, while the title of the work brings to mind Andy Warhol’s experimental film Sleep from 1964, in which John Giorno is seen sleeping for over five hours – an ironic fusion of seemingly extremely diverse references that was to become typical of Majerus’ practice. Eine gute Idee (1992) presumably goes back to a comic, an image-text medium that played a central role in gemälde, the artist’s first solo exhibition at neugerriemschneider in 1994. The composition shows a walking figure in a snowy environment. It is accompanied by the speech bubble “A good idea …”, which locates the motif in a specific context in the original story, but stands here as an abstract statement. Nevertheless, the size of the work corresponds with other paintings in the exhibited group of works and thus heralds Majerus’ 60 x 60 cm paintings begun in the mid-1990s, which encompass very different subjects and can be flexibly combined in the hanging.
Majerus’ early work will be presented this autumn at both neugerriemschneider and the Matthew Marks Gallery. While another bild in Berlin will focus on the formative period of his late student years, in New York, large-format canvases from 1991 to 1993 will be shown alongside works painted in Berlin in 1995. Together, the exhibitions shed light on the emergence of Majerus’ artistic vocabulary, which was to become institutionally visible for the first time in 1996 at the Kunsthalle Basel. Parallel to noch ein bild, the Michel Majerus Estate is launching the series “Lectures on Lectures”, in which the lectures that Majerus has given over the course of his career at the invitation of institutions and art academies and which offer rare access to his artistic thinking and work will be shown publicly for the first time and contextualised through talks, short lectures and selected works by the artist. The first event will be “My View of Polke”, a performative exploration by Majerus of Sigmar Polke’s work on the occasion of the exhibition Sigmar Polke: The Three Lies of Painting at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn in 1997. Susanne Kleine, who invited Majerus to take part at the time, will look back on the event and the connection between the two artists on 13 September.
Michel Majerus, Noch ein Bild, 1992, © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, oil on board, 24 x 27 cm
Works by Michel Majerus (1967 – 2002) have been shown in solo exhibitions in international museums and institutions, including Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2023, 2006); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2022); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld (2018); CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (2012); Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2011); Kunsthaus Graz, Graz (2005); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005); Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg (2005); Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover (2005); Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2004); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2003), and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (1996). Majerus took part in the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg (1998).
Opening: Thursday, 11. September, 6 – 10 pm.
Exhibition dates: Friday, 12. September– Saturday, 18. October 2025
To the gallery
Title image caption: Michel Majerus, Schwein – Maus, 1992, © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, acrylic on wood, 29 x 38.5 cm
Exhibition Michel Majerus – Galerie neugerriemschneider | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
