Marc Brandenburg valuation
Berlin artist of meticulous pencil drawings that reverse light and dark like photographic negatives, often shown under UV light.
Marc Brandenburg was born in Berlin in 1965, the son of a German mother and an African American soldier, and spent his early childhood in Texas before returning with his family to West Berlin in 1977, where he found the punk scene.
What a work by Marc Brandenburg is worth
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Bio
Marc Brandenburg was born in Berlin in 1965, the son of a German mother and an African American soldier, and spent his early childhood in Texas before returning with his family to West Berlin in 1977, where he found the punk scene. From 1983 to 1988 he was the doorman at the Dschungel nightclub, and he worked, self-taught, as a fashion designer. In 1992 he began photographing his surroundings on long walks and translating the photographs into freehand graphite drawings with the tones reversed, so that the figures appear as photographic negatives: drug users, rough sleepers, street performers, protesters, clowns at demonstrations, football fans and people in costume, each isolated and held still. He often shows them under ultraviolet light, which makes the room glow and turns the reversal into a reversal of values, towards the people a society pushes to its edges. He also works in photography, performance, film, installation and fashion, and lives in Berlin and Barcelona.
The drawings, in graphite on paper and often small, are the core of his market. Graphite smudges and paper discolours, so framing should keep the glazing off the surface, and drawings made for ultraviolet display should not be left in strong daylight. Thaddaeus Ropac represents him.
Berlin, Texas and the Dschungel
His first institutional solo exhibition, Oceans of Violence, at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 1993, included his Camouflage Pullover for Foreigners, a response to the xenophobic riots at Rostock-Lichtenhagen the year before.
A retrospective was shown at the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt in 2021, and his work is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
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