Palais Populaire

Marc Brandenburg’s pencil drawings, reversed into negatives, capture everyday, ephemeral motifs, including costumed demonstrators, a bank in Berlin's Tiergarten, garbage, graffiti, advertising, sleeping places of homeless people. The artist, who was born in 1965, strolls through cities such as Berlin, London, and Barcelona, photographing his impressions and then drawing them “like a human photocopier.” In this almost meditative process, he finds beauty in social conditions that are increasingly becoming the object of hatred in our society: the sensitive, the endangered, the traumatized, the precarious. Brandenburg is interested in moments when inner and outer states unite, when human beings merge with their costumes, their clothing, or their dwellings. Formal and conceptual aspects of drawing, as well as a fundamental examination of representation, are more important to him than the motifs themselves. “The emptiness behind the images, the translucent white, is important.” Hirnsturm II is a visual essay that combines drawings from a period of over 25 years with more recent works such as the video installation Camouflage Pullover (2018). In addition, many new works will be created expressly for the exhibition at the PalaisPopulaire.