Markus is familiar with the woman in the photograph and knows her name, and yet continues to ask who she is – over and over, a thousand times – revealing her as an unstable form that is incomplete and forever unattainable. In his obsessive action (only hundreds of whose products are on display here) , every canvas, every painted wooden surface, is a portrait of her, inasmuch as they are a self-reflexive portrait of the artist. Each portrait represents an option of a defined frame – a particular movement in the art, a style, structure, form, finite existence. Together, they create a weave that conveys countless possible realizations.
Markus created the first portraits in the 1679.jpg series as a figurative analogy for photography. Then, using techniques from the world of photography – defocusing, close-up, cropping – he dived into a single frozen moment of broken temporality and created an abstract analogy of it. The more he deepened his scrutiny of the image, the more complex and intricate his work became. He began creating portraits based on it through drawing, monotype, and printing, then producing additional paintings based on these works, or from memory – which brought about an abstraction, draining, or disassembly of the image. As he moved between figurative and abstract worlds and back again, the flat digital image became ever more layered, material, and complex. Thus, this body of work as a whole raises questions about memory and commemoration of a single figure, as well as questions pertaining to originality and creativity.
Markus’s multiple painting consists of detailed handicraft, an endless pursuit of a profusion of materializations, a continuous accretion of meanings. He shows an interest in the conditions of the artistic creation, thereby uncovering new perspectives and revealing the absence of a fixed and defined essence. Every little detail creates the meaning for its existence, autonomous and unique yet deficient and in constant flux.
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