Just as the last century was coming to a close, a young artist from Luxembourg named Michel Majerus was on a hot streak, possessed with apparently endless ideas about how to make a painting.
He silk-screened Nintendo’s Mario, reproduced corporate branding and liberally sampled the work of other artists. He painted wry turns of phrase — “What looks good today may not look good tomorrow,” for one — but also scintillating abstractions. Sometimes, he combined all those modes into piquant stews of high and low, banal and profound. Still in his early 30s, Mr. Majerus was tapped to create an enormous mural for the 1999 Venice Biennale, and in 2000, he built a skate ramp emblazoned with his signature tropes for another exhibition, in Cologne, Germany.
Then, on Nov. 6, 2002, flying into Luxembourg City from his home base of Berlin, Mr. Majerus was killed when the plane he was on crashed in heavy fog. He was 35. Two decades later, Mr. Majerus is “an influence on many generations, from his onward,” Alex Gartenfeld, the artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, said in a phone interview, “and you see that in the enthusiasm by other artists for his work.”
The superstar Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, 60, made paintings a couple of years ago that borrow some of Mr. Majerus’s imagery. “I was envious of his amazing dexterity, or footwork, that I saw in the way he incorporated in his work” materials like “Japanese manga and game cultures, American cartoons, and product logos/icons,” Mr. Murakami said in an email. Many celebrated figures who have come after Mr. Majerus, like Cory Arcangel, 44, and Jamian Juliano-Villani, 35, are also among his admirers.
More fans may be minted soon, thanks to an unprecedented array of Majerus offerings over the next few months. The first museum survey for him in the United States opened at the ICA Miami Nov. 28, in the run-up to Art Basel Miami Beach. Across the Atlantic, five museums and art spaces in Germany have come together to stage shows for a program called “Michel Majerus 2022,” each approaching his practice from a different angle. (Despite its name, it will run to early 2023.)
The dispersed curatorial endeavor is perhaps fitting for such a restlessly inventive artist, and for one whose work examines how images circulate through networks of information and commerce. The ICA show, “Michel Majerus: Progressive Aesthetics” (through March 12), includes about two dozen of his (often enormous) paintings, with samples from disparate sources, like parts of Andy Warhol’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s collaborative work, a Nike shoe and a NASCAR crash. “One of the things that he intuited really early on was that digital imagery — and, or imagery from the internet — could be just another tool in his painterly toolbox,” Mr. Gartenfeld said.
Working in those early days of the internet in a kind of extreme Pop Art mode, Mr. Majerus seemed to be envisioning the image (and advertising) overloads that were to come, both on social media and on an endlessly multiplying array of video outlets. “I find the work, like, completely aggressive. Dystopic,” Mr. Arcangel, whose art plays with technology and games, said, approvingly. “I find it’s almost like acid — it’s just like a vat of acid being poured in the world.”
Ms. Juliano-Villani, a painter who conjures her own bizarre compositions from far-flung realms, proposed in an email that Mr. Majerus “was making a soundboard of painting strokes that were all about the moment, just like a D.J. Like, how did you even do that?”
Given his serial visual plundering, it is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Majerus could be astute, and mischievous, about how his own work was seen. For a 1994 outing at the Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider, he asked that a road be paved inside the modest exhibition space, placing his art in a very literal street-art context. His dealers dutifully complied, convincing a crew working nearby to do the job. The gallery has since moved, but it has restaged that show, “Gemälde” (“Painting”), road and all, at its current location in a replica of the old space, where it runs through Jan. 14.
Neugerriemschneider is also making Mr. Majerus the focal point of its Miami Basel booth, covering its walls with a 2013 wallpaper by the German artist Thomas Bayrle, 85, that grabs elements of two paintings by the late artist (who had been his friend), and morphs them into a characteristically trippy pattern that suggests a Photoshop job run amok. A 13-foot-wide Majerus painting of a video cassette (one of Mr. Bayrle’s sources) and art by others will hang atop it. (Matthew Marks Gallery, of New York and Los Angeles, will be exhibiting the artist’s work at the fair, too.)
Mr. Majerus’s works, and the “Michel Majerus 2022” series, are filled with such intergenerational dialogues, borrowings, appropriations and remixes. Teachers take center stage in a show at the artist’s old Berlin studio, now the headquarters of his estate, through March 18. It unites his work with that of two of his professors at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart — the pioneering American conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, famed for his text pieces, and the German painter K.R.H. Sonderborg, who made brash abstractions — and argues he learned from both their approaches. Mr. Majerus graduated from the school in 1992 before heading to Germany’s capital. “He really didn’t want to be a Luxembourg artist,” Mr. Gartenfeld said. “He wanted to be an artist who is thought of as global. Berlin, for him, was a step in doing that.”
What might have been? That is the painful, obvious question that attends the death of any young artist, and particularly one who seems able to look into the future, like Mr. Majerus. There is also the question of figuring out what he actually did. The KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin is showing his early works, including many that it says have never been exhibited, through Jan. 15, and the estate is planning to compile a catalogue raisonné, a complete accounting of his output.
Mr. Majerus left notes and drawings explaining how to adapt installations for different venues, but not always, Ruth Kißling, who works at the estate, said. “It’s like a puzzle, or sometimes I feel like a detective, trying to find the hints that give a better understanding of how he conceived the works.” The Neuer Berliner Kunstverein’s “Michel Majerus” show, opening Dec. 17 and running through Feb. 5, is highlighting that body of work. (The fifth exhibition in the series, looking at the digital aspects of his practice, “Michel Majerus — Data Streaming,” is at the Kunstverein in Hamburg until Feb. 12, where Mr. Arcangel also has a one-person show. In addition, 13 German museums are displaying the Majeruses in their collections. Next year, the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg will mount a major Majerus show.)
It is Mr. Majerus’s moment, as images ricochet around the globe in fractions of a second, through billions of devices, aiming to sell, seduce and persuade, guided by strings of proprietary computer code. As it happens, Mr. Murakami knew his art many years ago, but “almost as soon as I started posting on Instagram, an algorithm got activated so that Majerus’s work was often suggested to me as something I would like,” he said, “so I took note of it.”
Andrew Russeth
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