Marc Brandenburg (born July 18, 1965) is a German artist.
Marc Brandenburg was born in Berlin in 1965, the son of a German mother and an Afro-American GI who worked for the US military. In 1968 he moved with his family to the US, and returned in 1977 to West Berlin, where he soon came into contact with the punk scene. From 1983 until 1988 he worked as a doorman in the Berlin nightclub Dschungel,[1] which he had been frequenting since the late 1970s. Named by his mother after Marc Bohan, the chief designer of Dior, he began to work, self-taught, as a fashion designer in 1984, and frequently collaborated with other designers such as Claudia Skoda, PLEZ and Tabea Blumenschein.[2] In 1988 he appeared in East Berlin with the performance art and music group Die Tödliche Doris.
Fashion was to remain an element of his artistic work. Thus, in his first institutional solo exhibition Oceans of Violence (with Sabina Maria van der Linden) at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (1993), he showed his work Camouflage Pullover for Foreigners[2] and a Burberry camouflage cap, a reaction to the 1992 violent xenophobic riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen. In 2009 he collaborated with designer Bernhard Wilhelm for a collection,[3] in 2010 he designed undershirts for Schiesser,[4] and in 2016 he worked with Bless on the Daycation collection.[5]
Marc Brandenburg lives in Berlin and Barcelona.
In 1992 Brandenburg began documenting his surroundings in photographs and translated these photos into freehand pencil drawings. Very early in his exhibitions, he sampled elements from porn and fashion magazines, advertisements and packaging of plastic toys and combined them with drawings of personal imagery.[2] 1994 saw the publication of his Picture book,[6] with drawings portraying a fictitious day in his Berlin circle of friends. In 1996 he started to use copy machines and computer to invert and distort his photos and to use the prints as templates for his drawings. Since the mid-1990s, he has produced multiple series of drawings, which he often lines up at eye level to form film-like sequences, achieving effects such as zoom, panning shots or blurring in the individual drawings.[7]
In this period, he made numerous staged and performative self-portraits using disguises, again making photographs, then pencil copies, concentrating on role-play and body images, costumes and rituals outside social norms. His motifs included right-wing extremists, hooligans, costumed anti-globalisation activists, participants in raves and parades, homeless people and eccentrics, his core themes being "overload, excess, addiction, overkill.“[8]
Since the beginning of his career Brandenburg's work has frequently been associated with 1960s and 1980s pop culture and Andy Warhol's artistic praxis,[9] or – due to Brandenburg's homosexuality[10] and his mixed-race origin – interpreted in a queer, anti-racist context.[11] He himself, however, emphasised that he felt the formal and conceptual aspects of drawing and the fundamental exploration of representation to be more important than the motifs themselves: "The main thing is this void behind the images, the white showing through."[8]
After his 2005 solo exhibition in the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, to mark the award of the Karl Ströher Prize, Brandenburg often installed his drawings under black light in darkened rooms, giving the effect of a negative. He described this as the "counterpart to the White Cube".[8] At the end of the 2000s, he began working with different forms of reproductions, transferring his original drawings into copies, screen prints, stickers or temporary tattoos. In 2009 he produced a permanent screen-print installation for the Berlin club Berghain, where he also designed a kiosk for a group exhibition in 2014, selling tattoos with motifs from Berghain's architecture and found objects such as used condoms, buttplugs and the bouncer's head.[12] In exhibitions such as Normex in the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg (2012), he designed entire rooms with sticker foils running along the walls[13] or arranged as transparent clusters on window-panes so that the daylight projected the drawings into the room.[14]
Marc Brandenburg. White Rainbow, 2ème édition, Zeichnungsbuch, vol. 20, published by Maas Media Verlag, 2005, ISBN 978-3-9812127-2-3
