MARKUS LINNENBRINK

MARKUS LINNENBRINK - TOOMANYSNAKESUNDERTHISHOUSE

Technique: Pigments, epoxy resin on wood

Artist Biography:

 

Evoking the stripe paintings of Morris Louis and Gene Davis, Markus Linnenbrink creates colorful drip paintings in small and large formats that sometimes invade the environments in which they are shown. Color and pictorial processes are Linnenbrik's main concerns, and he builds his compositions using carefully layered drips, resulting in bright, saturated color compositions. Sometimes consisting of precise stripes and exquisite lines, his works abound in both tactile surfaces and pools of resin. His work suggests the spontaneity of a more intuitive process, a sense that elevates with occasional subtle interruptions. He attended Gesamthochschule in Kassel, as well as the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Among his most recent mural paintings is the monumental 38,000 square meter painting on the facade of the SLS Brickell Hotel by Jorge Perez's group in Miami and another 2 x 28 meters in the lobby of Rockefeller 75 in New York. He has recently exhibited at Waterhouse & Dodd in New York, NY, the Kunstmuseum Bochum in Germany and the Beijing Biennale 2010, among others. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Ministry of Culture, The Hague, The Netherlands; Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA; Harvard College, Cambridge, MA; The Chapel Museum of Art, Dartmouth University, Hannover, NH; Neue Galerie Museum, Kassel, Germany; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The San Jose Museum of Art, CA; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Wellesley College, MA and the Western Collection, Oaks, PA, among others. At once inventive and virtuosic, Linnenbrink's paintings can be described as performative or extreme. The artist pours and melds resin with accumulated layers of opaque and translucent pigments, building the dramatic materiality that characterizes his pieces. Using a medium with ephemeral malleability, his early epoxy paintings depended on the joint action of liquidity and the force of gravity; later interventions on the surface were conceived with mechanical assistance, by dormanting concentric depressions and then chiseled channels. These innumerable layers of resin of different colors that the German artist juxtaposes speak to us of time, of the notion of 'journey' and of our human condition as finite beings. Each of the layers of his Cuts covers the previous one, just as the present covers the past; Linnenbrink reveals them through incisions of different depths, glimpses of what used to be the first layer, of what used to be the present. In his Drippings, the numerous strands of paint speak of the time of concrete life through which we glide without knowing how much time we have but with the certainty that it is limited - the artist does not know where the drops will end up. They thus reduce our existence to a linear and irreversible dimension, connecting us to virtually every form of life we know.