BERLIN.- The work of Berlin-based artist Marc Brandenburg (*1965) moves between drawing, collage, installation, video, and performance. He has been a fixture of Berlin’s creative scene since the 1980s and is among the most important artist-draftspersons of the present internationally. Central to his work are detailed pencil drawings after photographic sources. Brandenburg captures them on forays through the city or finds them in magazines, films, and books. In several work steps, he inverts the pictures, reverses light and dark areas, distorts them, and finally transfers them freely to paper. What result are thus abstracted pictures of reality.

As a close observer of life in the metropolis, Brandenburg seeks out the peculiarities of urban reality and directs his attention to seemingly trivial things beyond standardized notions of beauty. At the same time, pop culture symbols are part of his world of images: portraits of famous individuals, pornography, fast food, kitsch. Brandenburg regards excess and consumption as well as social ills as effects of late capitalism. His pictures nonetheless rarely transport a narrative, but instead generate a melancholic and ominous atmosphere that subtly references the crises of our era: 20th Century Debris.

The exhibition at Berlnische Galerie presents about 150 works by the artist with loans, for instance, from the Deutsche Bank Collection, the Federal Republic of Germany’s Contemporary Art Collection, the Kupfer- stichkabinett of the Berlin State Museums, as well as other private and public collections. They include both current and also early, rarely shown drawings from the 1990s, alongside videos, tattoo editions, and photo- graphs.

Artistic Practice

Pencil drawings are Marc Brandenburg’s primary medium. The meticulous execution of his photo- realistic works exerts a great fascination. Photos, which he describes as a sort of sketch, stand at the beginning of his process. He then transforms the pictures, whether his own photographs or ones taken from magazines, by transferring them to paper freely and without aids. In the late 1990s, Brandenburg started abstracting his motifs, and the inversion of pictures remains his most striking sty- listic device until today. “I can look at the positive image and already see what it’ll look like as a negative,” says Brandenburg. Around the turn of the millennium, he started manipulating his photogra- phic models further: distorting them and making them dissolve into abstract forms.

Early Works

Marc Brandenburg created his first series of drawings in the 1990s. Since then, working in tightly delimited groups of works has been central to his practice. In the first room of the exhibition are drawings from five work series.

“From June to November” from 1993 is the earliest series in the exhibition. It consists of realistic drawings of interiors and still lifes, portraits of famous individuals, as well as pictures from cigarette advertisements and explicit scenes. One year later, in “Bilderbuch” (Picture Book) Brandenburg’s focus shifted to his own photographic material. He now gave the always still fragmentary motifs a fixed framing in the form of black lines or light scribbles. In the drawings in the series “The Dangling Conversation,” produced in 1966, he contrasts the soft modulation with staples that pierce the paper or attached paperclips. With “Meddle” of 1998, Brandenburg finally arrived at his characteristic inversion of tonal values. In “White Rainbow,” the negative aesthetic is supplemented with abstract forms that call to mind camera panning shots and convey blurred impressions of speed or simultaneity.

Under Blacklight

The second room of the exhibition is illuminated by blacklight. Brandenburg has been presenting his drawings in this way since 2000. As a result of the unusual lighting, the white areas of the paper fluoresce. The drawings seem to shine and, with the interplay between them, generate a spatial experience. In the works shown, which were produced from the mid-2000s until today, Brandenburg circles around topics like bodies or clothing and/or costumes.

He traces their outward appearance in a society that, for him, seems to be at a breaking point due to increasing isolation, inequality, and capitalist excess. In 2024, Marc Brandenburg simultaneously dedicated himself to the topic of landscape again after a longer period of time with two large panorama drawings of the Berlin Tiergarten.

Brandenburg regards his observation of the metropolis as well as the artistic rendering of it as strictly documentary. In the exhibition, his static drawings are supplemented with new video works. They once again impressively show his remarkable powers of observation and how he encounters his motifs in random situations. An uncanny atmosphere, resulting from the inversion and slowing-down of the videos, is further increased by the ghostly audio.

Temporary Tattoos

Since 2012, Brandenburg has been designing editions of temporary tattoos based on his drawings. Over the years, he has created over ten such editions, thus, for instance, for the ten-year anniversary of the Berghain techno club. After transposing photographs into drawings, a new change of medium takes place here, with which the artist examines people as picture carriers. Brandenburg uses the music-based term “sampling” for his way of working, for his combining of pictures from various sources. Material both found and his own is thus remixed again and again, with the inter- play giving rise to contrasts and analogies. The act of “sampling” once again comes to mind when Branden- burg’s drawings are combined anew on skin.

Photographs

For Brandenburg, the photograph is like a sketch. Even though he does not regard himself as a photographer, his artistic process begins with capturing situations with the camera. Over the years, this has resulted in an extensive visual archive, some of whose motifs he first transposes into drawings at a much later point in time. The photographs presented in the exhibition thus provide insights into the artist’s visual cosmos, but also make clear, among other things, the precision with which he translates the snapshot aesthetic into drawing.

Marc Brandenburg

Marc Brandenburg was born in West Berlin in 1965. He spent his early childhood in the United States. In 1977, he returned to his home city, where punk became a formative experience and he found himself in the creative subculture of West Berlin. Through fashion, Brandenburg came to art as an autodidact and he started exhibiting his drawings in the 1990s. Solo exhibitions followed, for instance, at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (1993), MMK Frankfurt (2005), Denver Art Museum (2010), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2011), PalaisPopulaire (2021), Städel Museum (2021/2022), and many others. He lives and works today in Berlin and Barcelona.