Outset Germany donated Marc Brandenburg’s graphite drawing Untitled (2010) to Hamburger Kunsthalle in cooperation with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris/Salzburg.
Berlin-based artist Marc Brandenburg (b. 1965) has emerged as one of the best-known artist of his generation. Influenced by the pop and punk culture of the 1960s and 1980s respectively, Brandenburg’s graphite drawings document Berlin’s subversive nightlife, portraits of friends or extremely zoomed-in details of banal, ordinary objects.
Brandenburg is fascinated by velocity and movement, which become manifest in his realistic scenes with public demonstrators, flag-waving football fans, clowns and fairgrounds, his portraits of friends and relatives and his water fountains, which all have an unsettlingly threatening effect.
Brandenburg draws from his own snapshots and sampled material,this often to further be distorted and inverted via computer. Brandenburg then not only copies the imagery but also the technology that captures and manipulates the images as freehand pencil drawings. These seemingly inverted images have a stunning effect: portraits or images distorted to the point of abstraction take on an intensity and sharpness that alienates the subject while simultaneously giving them a ruthless precision.
Nevertheless, Brandenburg does not believe in the power of the ultimate, singular image – instead he often hangs his drawings close together in a manner that resembles a filmstrip. According to Brandenburg, it is through this series of images that a dialogue emerges between the individual pictures: "It’s about what cannot be depicted; it’s about the aura, the spaces in between."
