Michel Majerus - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gio Marconi, Milan

  • Catalogue Essay

    Prior to his tragic and early death in 2002 in a plane crash, Michel Majerus produced an extensive oeuvre, capturing the attention critical attention of the contemporary world. Luxembourg born, Majerus was one of the most formidable figures of the new generation of painters, his work has been included in numerous important group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Although painting was his preferred medium for expression, Majerus’s work extended its talons into many aspects of popular culture, ranging from computer games to glossy advertisements, he would select from the anonymous pictorial cosmos that surrounded him. “Majerus’s work constitutes the most important counterposition to the revival of expressionist styles in early twenty-first-century
    painting…His art had a specific kind of newness, ‘originality of the avant-garde,’ but the prepackaged newness of the latest cell-phone graphic or just released sneaker from Nike. Majerus’s work was about this newness.”
    (D. Birnbaum, Search Engine: The Art of Michel Majerus, Art Forum, February 2006, p. 170)
     
    Majerus’s images and visual environments represent an approach to painting that is impossible to reference and understand in the terms of a return to anything from the past, treating the medium of painting as one that is forever on the verge of a collapse. This said, Majerus’s work also displayed an appreciation of the history of 20th Century painting, making references to such artist as Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and Frank Stella as well as the obvious canonised master of pop, Andy Warhol.The current lot, Express, is a fresh and explosive work that empowers all of Majerus’s artistic and cultural interests, an image with a painterly approach to a language more recognised within the language of advertising and consumer culture.
     

370

Express

2001
Acrylic on canvas.
280 x 400 cm. (110 1/2 x 157 1/2 in).
Signed, titled and dated 'Majerus 01 Express' on the reverse.

Estimate
£50,000 - 70,000 

Sold for £51,650

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London