In the years following the tragic death of Michel Majerus in a plane crash in 2002, the art world was slow to grasp the significance of his bold, neon-strewn canvases and wildly ambitious installations. They were considered too 90s, the aesthetic was maybe too flashy, too designy. Twenty years on, no one would dream of talking about him in those terms.
Today, the Luxembourgish artist is celebrated for his innate ability to gather up the cacophonous visual elements of mass consumer culture and spew them with dazzling wit and energy across his work. All the sources swimming around his young head (advertising logos, corporate branding, even Disney characters) were all seamlessly integrated into an art practice that, by sheer force of his imagination, cohered into startling and vital works of art.
There’s a sense of invasiveness too.
His early embrace of technology is the focus of the latest exhibition at the Michel Majerus Estate, located in the artist’s former studio in Prenzlauer Berg. Despite sustaining some damage, Majerus’s Macintosh PowerBook G3 – a great beast of a laptop – miraculously survived the crash. Left dormant for years, in 2017, contemporary artists Cory Archangel and Dragan Espenschied began a project with the aim to revive it. Rather than simply retrieving the files from the hard drive, the team employed state-of-the-art technology to emulate the precise architectural layout of the original laptop. Straight away, they “discovered how advanced he was”, says Archangel, himself a pioneer of technology-based art. “He wasn’t just a Sunday laptop user. This really was his studio.”
Archangel has recently finished the first of five accompanying videos explaining the rebooting process (on permanent loop in the exhibition). Shot like a YouTube chess influencer video, we see him opening a simulation of Majerus’s laptop, systematically exploring the various compositions and images that were stored there (any personal content was discreetly removed by the artist’s family).
Berlin’s tragic lost son remains as unknowable as ever.
It is an intriguing watch, but once you’ve got over the excitement of them rebooting it, there’s a sense of invasiveness too, of delving deep into Majerus’ private world that was never intended for public display. It boils down to our perception of digital archives, an increasingly significant aspect of art history research: should exploring his old laptop be regarded any differently from exploring his old studio, now transformed into this pristine exhibition space?
Entitled ‘Let’s Play Majerus G3’, the current exhibition is curated by Archangel and shows a selection of his own work alongside a handful of sculptures and canvases by Majerus. His stacked white boxes printed with posing Marios and characters from Toy Story – a sardonic homage to Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes – are placed before a matte-black aluminium wall work by Archangel; the three stripes of Adidas run down it like giant scratches.
Seeing their art together makes you realise how much the two artists have in common; their work exudes the same cool irony, with both drawing on a range of elusive references. Despite the distance in time between them, their works complement and feed off each other, Archangel’s work echoing the time warp Majerus inhabits. An artist so deeply entrenched in his era but then so visionary, Majerus’s work seems to hoover up and to assimilate into everything around it.
Further revelations about Majerus’s working processes will no doubt come to light in Archangel’s subsequent videos. Strangely though, as you watch the retro cursor navigating his recreated desktop, Majerus becomes an increasingly distant presence, reduced to a series of poetically aloof, digital decisions. “The computer is entirely a work product,” Archangel admits. “I still have no idea who he is.” And maybe that’s no bad thing – Berlin’s tragic lost son remains as unknowable as ever.
- Let’s Play Majerus G3 through Mar 15, 2025, Michel Majerus Estate, Prenzlauer Berg, Knaackstraße 12, details.
