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Michael Markwick

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Earth, Fire, Concrete
2008
Oil on canvas/ 2 panels
360 x 210 cm

The Recent Paintings of Michael Markwick

A Michael Markwick painting is a collision: things have slammed together and now they are ready to fly apart. War, television, childhood, nature, art, and human bodies, all offer up their particular forms of anxiety, nostalgia, and abjection in his work. An image of a tree fractures the surface of a painting like a rock through a window. A hallucinogenic cloud envelops the looming figure of a suicide bomber—or is it an angel, or an insect? Tree forms hold body parts—a strange fruit, a grotesque burl. These paintings are constructed out of layered oppositions: anxious, urgent pressures of the bitter and the sweet, the desolate and the comfortable, the dirty and the pure, the cosmic and the ordinary.

The way Markwick handles paint is integral to these collisions. Images are constantly obliterated and restored in acts of painting that are analogs of the narrative; a collision of pigment and canvas parallels its subject. The marks constrict and expand. The paint crusts and drips. These paintings consist of densely compressed layers whose accumulated history creates a surface tension where the last layer of paint is stretched tautly over all the others. The predictable and the indeterminate push uneasily against each other. Color is both luminous and dull, and it vibrates in an anxious tension of decoration and violence. Pale tints of green and red with all the sweet commercialism of retro interior design collide with blacks and grays that suggest the destruction of trench warfare. Something happened, something is going to happen.

The physicality of these paintings, the layering, the additive and subtractive shifts in his process, the boldness of the contrasts, and the aggressive drawing are suggestive of Markwick’s interest in various Dutch and German graphic traditions, particularly expressionist woodcuts. The paintings reference a wide range of art history. Hints of Otto Dix and Max Beckman mingle with the strange visionary paintings of Henry Darger. Fundamental to his work are sixteenth-century Northern Renaissance paintings, particularly the apocalyptic works by artists such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Matthias Grünewald. But issues of contemporary global culture-things like consumerism, pollution, and technology-equally inform Markwick’s paintings, and the day-to-day materials and experiences of urban life such as web design and graffiti formally structure his work. Environmental degradation, genocide, torture, militarism, hunger, and sickness seep into his images in ways that are subtler, but just as urgent as they are in Breughel’s Triumph of Death.

Markwick embodies a complicated mix of ethnic, national, and class identities, and his personal history heavily influences his work. The trees represented in his recent series of paintings carry with them the particular desolation of trees near the Michigan trailer park where he grew up. This is a small forest of rotting wetlands and urban trash on the margins of a city—littered, tangled, impenetrable woods. But his paintings carry a bigger perspective that comes out of his cultural hybridity. His works have a doubleness, a form of irony that is deep in the work. This isn’t the glib irony of small jokes and wry wit. He uses conventions of painting that double back on themselves. Much like the work of Francis Bacon, Markwick’s vocabulary of Romanticism—expressionism, the heroic—is used to critique a culture that fetishizes freedom and the individual. Markwick adopts the language of expressionism as a sign, and combined with an indiscriminate mixture of high and low culture—Breughel and anime, for example—it creates an anxiety of not knowing where we are in this mix of history, pop-culture, and mythological freedom.

Timothy van Laar
Professor of Art
University of Illinois
January 2009

Michael Markwick

1974 born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

Lives and works in Berlin / Den Haag, Germany

Education

M.F.A. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, U.S.A. 2002
B.F.A. Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S.A. 1998

Grants

2009 Standard Werk Budget,FBKVB Amsterdam Fonds, Netherlands
2007 Netherlands Royal Painting Prize. Nomination
2006 Basisstipendium, FBKVB Amsterdam Fonds, Netherlands
2005 Artist in Residence: Kunstfabrik Berlin. CBK Dordrecht, The Netherlands/ Kunstfabrik Berlin.
2004 Project Subsidie: Centrum Beeldende Kunst- Dordrecht, the Netherlands
2003 Project Subsidie: Centrum Beeldende Kunst- Dordrecht, the Netherlands
2000 Pew-Younger Scholarship: "Contemporary Art and The Question of Boundaries” Notre Dame University
2000 Collection Fund Award: "Sixty Square Inches: National Small Print Exhibition" West Lafayette, IN, U.S.A.

Solo Exhibitions

2010 Michael Markwick: Periphery Rising. Drawings. Kunst in Kreuzberg e. V./ Atelierhof Kreuzberg. Berlin.
2008 Deeper/ After Relocation >> New Excavations and Paintings [Tussenstop] Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht, (NL)
2006 Quiet Apocalypse: 2yk Gallery Kunstfabrik Am Flutgraben: Berlin, (DE)
2006 Rise: Pictura, Derde Zaal, Dordrecht, the Netherlands
2006 wysiwyg, Kunstoffice, Berlin (DE)
2005 Galleria il Sotoportego, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venice, Italy, Post Consumption: New Paintings ”
2002 Pictura, Event Horizon: Dordrecht, (NL)

Group Exhibitions

2010 A VIEW WITHOUT END: Dutch artists in Berlin. Autocenter. Berlin (DE) [cat]
2010 Kunst Vlaai Art Fair. Schwarzwald.Cultuurpark Westergasfabriek. Amsterdam, (NL)
2010 Hier gibt es keine falschen hase. Forgotten bar project/ Galerie im Regierungsvierte. Berlin (DE)
2010 Schwarzwald, Noordkap. Dordrecht, (NL)
2009 Anonymous Drawings N°10 Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin (DE) [cat]
2009 Disturbed Nature: Drei Künstler am Rande des Natürlichen. Cluster, Berlin (DE)
2009 “Youth Cult” Dadapost. Berlin (DE) March.
2009 Over-leven Sur-vivre Sur-vive I: Gallery Invorm. Hasselt (BE)
2009 Opposites Attract – On Dialectics. Galerie Witteveen/De Veemvloer. Amsterdam (NL)
2008 Safety Architecture. Martin Art Gallery Allentown, PA . ( U.S.A.). [cat]
2008 ART AMSTERDAM /Kunst Rai 2008: Tanya Rumpff of Haarlem, Netherlands
2007 Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst, Gemeentemuseum te Den Haag, (NL) [cat]
2007 Salon of de salon: Pictura, Dordrecht (NL)
2007 Historia: New Drawings and Objects, Michael Markwick and Jennifer Blazina, Pictura, Dordrecht, (NL)
2007 Crossing Boundaries, Hong Kong Graphic Arts Festival 2007, Hong Kong China
2007 Penang International Print Exhibition/ Penang State Art Gallery, Penang, Malaysia
2007 “Papier”: Galerie Röhr und Ripkin Berlin, (DE)
2006 Berliner Kunstsalon: Galerie Gillian Morris: Metamorphose. Berlin (DE)
2005 Centrum Beeldende Kunst, "aan het werk 4" Dordrecht, (NL) [cat]
2005 Korner Kiez,, STRING THEORY: Tania Bedriñana and Michael Markwick: Berlin, (DE)
2005 Galleria il Sotoportego,Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Emission: Venice, (IT)
2005 Contemporary Artists in Print: Emission Portfolio McMaster Gallery, University of South Carolina, U.S.A.
2005 Purdue University Rueff Galleries Exchange II: International and National Exchange Print Portfolios IN, U.S.A.
2005 Universität der Universität der Künste, "Emission” Berlin Gallery (DE)

Projects

see artists site

Collections

(Selection)

Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerp, Belgium
Hong Kong Graphic Arts Center, Hong Kong, China
Frans Masereel Center, Kasterlee, Belgium
Indiana University, Bloomington Indiana U.S.A.
University of the Arts Philadelphia, PA, USA,
Purdue University U.S.A.
Mary Baldwin College Staunton, VA,
South Carolina University U.S.A.

Bibliography

b. 1974 April 3 Grand Rapids, Michigan U.S.A.
lives & works: Berlin Germany, The Hague ,Netherlands
Michael Maarten Markwick

Links

http://www.michaelmarkwick.com

Michael Markwick

urbanstrasse 45
10967
Berlin

Den Haag/ Netherlands

mail@michaelmarkwick.com
www.michaelmarkwick.com