Kunstverein Hamburg

DATA STREAMING features a series of works by Michel Majerus (1967–2002), produced during the latter stages of his career, in which he intensively negotiated the rising prominence of the digital within late-1990s and early-2000s visual culture. In this body of work, Majerus overlays figurative and abstract painterly elements drawn from the emerging digital image-production technologies of the time, adopting the formal language, capabilities, and motifs of post-production software such as Adobe Photoshop and translating them to canvas. As an avid user of technology and an active participant in digital culture, Majerus features a number of icons, both real and virtual, from video games, animation, and hacking in his work—for instance, he depicts the hacker Tron (1972–1998), and characters from Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Super Mario, among others. Combining such references with a wider range of imagery sampled from contemporary art and art history, he fuses an intricate network of visual and thematic references with methods of image-production to create smaller-format, large-scale, or multipanel paintings.

DATA STREAMING also includes Majerus’ key installation the space is where you’ll find it (2000), centrally positioned within the exhibition. This immersive installation exemplifies Majerus’ synthesis of new and existing aesthetic strategies from the worlds
of painting, installation, and conceptual art, enveloping viewers in an analogue cosmos of digital images. By bringing paintings and installation together in the present, DATA STREAMING asks how to view, understand, and interpret Majerus’ oeuvre through the prism of technological and artistic developments made in the last 20 years.

DATA STREAMING is part of a series of exhibitions that will look at Michel Majerus’ oeuvre anew to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the artist’s passing, with solo presentations hosted at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the Michel Majerus Estate, and at neugerriemschneider. In parallel, thirteen museums throughout Germany will showcase works by Michel Majerus from their collections.