Markus Linnenbrink

MARKUS LINNENBRINK - Toomanysnakesunderthishouse

Técnica: Pigments, epoxy resin on wood

Biografía del Artista:

Evoking the stripe paintings of Morris Louis and Gene Davis, Markus Linnenbrink creates colorful small and large-scale drip paintings that sometimes invade the environments in which they are displayed. Color and painterly processes are Linnenbrink’s primary concerns, and he constructs his compositions using carefully layered drips, resulting in compositions of saturated, brilliant color. Sometimes comprised of precise stripes and exquisite lines, his works abound simultaneously with tactile surfaces and pools of resin. His work suggests the spontaneity of a more intuitive process, a sense that is heightened by occasional subtle interruptions. He attended the Gesamthochschule in Kassel as well as the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Among his most recent mural paintings are the monumental 38,000 square meter mural on the façade of the SLS Brickell hotel by the Jorge Perez group in Miami and another 2 x 28 meter mural 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 2010 Beijing Biennial, among others. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Ministry of Culture in The Hague, Netherlands; Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA; Harvard College, Cambridge, MA; The Chapel Art Museum, Dartmouth College, Hannover, NH; Neue Galerie Museum, Kassel, Germany; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Wellesley College, MA and the West Collection, Oaks, PA, among others. At once inventive and virtuosic, Linnenbrink’s paintings can be described as performative or extreme. The artist pours and binds resin with accumulated layers of opaque and translucent pigments, constructing 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 gravity; later surface interventions were conceived with mechanical assistance, forming concentric depressions and then chiseled channels. These countless layers of resin of different colours 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 in his Cuts covers the previous one, just as the present covers the past; Linnenbrink reveals them through incisions of varying depth, glimpses of what was previously the first layer, of what was previously the present. In his Drippings, the numerous threads of paint speak of the time of concrete life through which we slide without knowing how much 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 with practically all the forms of life we ​​know.