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neugerriemschneider

WEB MAIL CALL DIRECTIONS

03 May –
28 Jun 2025

neugerriemschneider
03 May –
28 Jun 2025

Thomas Bayrle
bewegung im stillstand
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

At Linienstrasse 155, 10115 Berlin

neugerriemschneider

03 May –
09 Aug 2025

neugerriemschneider
03 May –
09 Aug 2025

Olafur Eliasson
The lure of looking through a polarised window of opportunities, or seeing a surprise before
it’s reduced, split, and then further reduced
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

At Christinenstrasse 18 – 19, 10119 Berlin

neugerriemschneider

03 May –
16 Aug 2025

neugerriemschneider
03 May –
16 Aug 2025

advective motion, nebulous currents
With works by Ai Weiwei, Thomas Bayrle, Andreas Eriksson, Mario García Torres, Isa Genzken, Shilpa Gupta, Louise Lawler, Sharon Lockhart, Tobias Rehberger, Tomás Saraceno, Simon Starling, Pae White 

Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm
At Linienstrasse 155, 10115 Berlin

neugerriemschneider
neugerriemschneiderneugerriemschneider

Thomas Bayrle
bewegung im stillstand

3 MAY until 28 JUN 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

At Linienstrasse 155, 10115 Berlin

Thomas Bayrle’s fourth solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, bewegung im stillstand, features a new body of paintings alongside collages and film from the 1980s and 1990s. Guided by the presentation’s title – “idle movement” – each of the works on view in this unique constellation are centered on the interfaces between an accelerated modern life, systems in and of motion, and the nature that, against all odds, persists in their midst. Snaking escalators, uniform metropolises and traversing pedestrians become potted plants, floral motifs or overflowing bounties by way of Bayrle’s signature compositional approach, the Superform – developed as a pre-digital technique and expanded here. Subjects and their component parts, duplicated and reshaped, enter a dialog around the manufactured and the organic, evolved from close engagement with the art-historical legacy of the still-life.

Thomas Bayrle, Pianta Robusta V, 2024
acrylic and FineArt print on linen
90 x 90 cm

© Thomas Bayrle.
Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

Throughout the exhibition, the artist brings into conversation dual fascinations that pervade his practice: modes of conveyance, and consumption of the mass-fabricated products of an industrialized society. Mobility, and the networks that enable it, have long appeared in his body of work as schematic highways, train tracks or conveyor belts, in reflections on the promise of infinite movement. He connotes people and goods in motion, the part rendered anonymous by the whole – contributors to the intricate machinery of the 20th and 21st centuries. Bayrle’s engagement with production in great numbers, and an economy that both feeds and demands it, stems from his first-hand witness of the German economic boom in the wake of the Second World War, his time spent operating an industrial Jacquard loom in the 1950s and his work at an advertising agency in 1960s Frankfurt. From these experiences, Bayrle created an oeuvre that brings to the fore his embrace of the ritual-like repetition inherent in large-scale economic models, utilizing it to conflate and probe the individual, the collective and their nuances.  

In Bayrle’s Pianta Robusta I through VIII (all 2024) and Frutta Robusta II (2025), a computer-generated shopping center’s escalators, running in parallel between its floors, repeats to form the works’ backgrounds and their motifs. By turning to the escalator and the indoor mall, Bayrle continues his pictorial investigation of commerce. Occupied only sparsely, the images’ ambiguous subjects exist as both newly constructed, pristine complexes, and once-grand structures pictured as their relevance wanes. The Pianta Robusta works’ squared elements, arranged in nine-by-nine grids, bulge, stretch, twist, magnify, compress and wrap suddenly as the eye progresses toward the surfaces’ centers. A potted plant emerges, its leaves bursting from a structured vessel. Printed in monochromatic greyscale, the works gain gestural touches of hand-applied acrylic paint that thinly coat fragments of the compositions in vibrant blues, greens, yellows and reds. The large-scale Frutta Robusta II shares this foundational scene, configured to a tipped basket and the pumpkins, eggs and corn it once contained, splayed out demonstratively before a viewer. Domesticized indoor plants take shape by way of digitally conceived architectural volumes, assembled to a sterilized city in Citta Pianta (2024), and urban motifs derived from those developed by the artist in the 1970s in Citta Pianta II (2024).

Natural life continues to take center stage in Bayrle’s A Rose is a Rose (1985) – a monumental floral portrait collaged from reduced street maps, shrunk and transformed to densely textured, gradated segments. Stone – Rose (1985) adopts a similar motif, yet is comprised of fragmented photographs taken of A Rose is a Rose, and mounted on cardboard, highlighting the intricately nested, cumulative process from which the artist’s work frequently results. In Bayrle’s Gummibaum (1993 – 1994), this method is set into motion as successive stills depicting a crowd crossing a patch of pavement, printed on sheets of latex, are painstakingly sequenced to an eight-minute film. First shown in their flattened, unmanipulated states, the frames are manually maneuvered to become a plant’s stem and leaves viewed as they rotate. Bayrle here summarizes the ethos that characterizes bewegung im stillstand, in which a world harnessed, contained or controlled, and the human-made apparatus of contemporary existence that populate it, are brought to coexist, the organic and the constructed partaking in symbiotic exchange.

Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937) is the subject of comprehensive retrospectives at SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, Frankfurt am Main and Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg in February 2026. He has previously been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin (2023); New Museum, New York (2018); MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2016); Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016); Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes (2014); WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2013); Madre – museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples (2013); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2013); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2009); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2009); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2008); and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2006). His work has been shown at leading group exhibitions including three editions of documenta (3, 6, and 13) in Kassel (1964, 1977, 2012), the 8th Busan Biennale (2012), the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008), the 9th Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon (2007), the 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2006), the 6th and 8th Gwangju Biennale (2006, 2010), the 2nd and 6th Guangzhou Triennial (2005, 2018) and the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennale (2003, 2009). Bayrle has been the recipient of several awards and prizes, including the Arnold-Bode-Preis (2012), the Cologne Fine Art Prize (2000) and the Prix Ars Electronica (1995). Bayrle lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.

For further press information and imagery, please contact Jonathan Friedrich Stockhorst:  +49 30 288 77277 or jonathan@neugerriemschneider.com. 

Olafur Eliasson
The lure of looking through a polarised window of opportunities, or seeing a surprise before
it’s reduced, split, and then further reduced

3 MAY until 9 AUG 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

At Christinenstrasse 18 – 19, 10119 Berlin

Olafur Eliasson’s ninth solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, The lure of looking through a polarised window of opportunities, or seeing a surprise before it’s reduced, split, and then further reduced, marks 30 years of collaboration with the gallery. The presentation builds on Eliasson’s ongoing exploration of the relativity of perception and features a new body of works that engages with the physical properties of light. 

Olafur Eliasson, The lure of looking through a polarised window of opportunities, or seeing a surprise before it’s reduced, split, and then further reduced, installation view: neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 2025. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin © 2025 Olafur Eliasson

Over the last three decades, Eliasson has examined our modes of seeing and encountering the world. The current exhibition extends this investigation with installations and complex geometric sculptures, using simple means to reveal the complexity of light and the contingency of what we see. 

The artworks on display share a common set of materials and principles. They all explore polarization – optical filters that allow light waves of a specific orientation, or polarity, to pass through them while blocking all other waves. Polarization filters are commonly found in photography, where they are used to reduce lens flares. Eliasson reimagines this conventional function with his latest series of works, using these filters instead to create unexpected optical effects. A new installation resembles an experimental setup constructed from simple materials: spotlights, sheets of plastic and polarizing filters. Two spotlights shine through a polarized window into the gallery rooms. The light falls onto two rotating, equally polarized sculptural forms, producing vibrant colors that dissolve and reemerge. This phenomenon results from a quality of the material known as birefringence, in which the transparent surface splits light waves into rays that move at slightly different angles and speeds. The combination of the birefringent material and the two polarizing filters conjures multiple colors through an analytic process, whereby the white light is reduced, split, and then further reduced. As in much of the artist’s practice, the act of viewing takes on a dynamic, embodied dimension. While some elements of the artwork are in motion, it is primarily the viewers’ own movements and the changing angles of their bodies that activate the artwork. By moving around and assuming a different angle of view, they alter what they see. The works come to life through their engagement. Eliasson’s concept of polarization suggests a shift from rigid oppositions to a more fluid and inclusive perspective. By revealing the inner workings of perception, the exhibition challenges and reorganizes preconceived notions, turning these mechanisms into ways to reconsider our environment.

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) is currently the subject of a series of institutional solo exhibitions staged throughout Southeast Asia. Inaugurated at Singapore Art Museum in 2024, before traveling to Auckland Art Gallery and later that year, it will continue to Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2025); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Jakarta (2025 – 2026); and Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2026). The artist has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2024); National Museum of Qatar, Doha (2023); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2022); Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2022); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2021)
; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo (2020); Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich (2020); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao (2020); Tate Modern, London (2019); Serralves, Porto (2019); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2018); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2018); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2016); Château de Versailles, Versailles (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2010); Museum of Modern Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2008); Tate Modern, London, (2003); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2001); and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (1997). Eliasson lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.

For further press information and imagery, please contact Jonathan Friedrich Stockhorst: +49 30 288 77277 or jonathan@neugerriemschneider.com

advective motion, nebulous currents
With works by Ai Weiwei, Thomas Bayrle, Andreas Eriksson, Mario García Torres, Isa Genzken, Shilpa Gupta, Louise Lawler, Sharon Lockhart, Tobias Rehberger, Tomás Saraceno, Simon Starling, Pae White 

3 MAY until 16 AUG 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

At Linienstrasse 155, 10115 Berlin

The group exhibition advective motion, nebulous currents takes obfuscation as its focus, with narratives dissolved behind fog, distorted, streaked, rippled and pixelated in transformative actions, or softened to blurs. Here, in sculptures, photographs, prints and textiles, the rigidity of an articulated image dissipates and reality becomes malleable – undefinable and fleeting. As compositions meld in on themselves, perception reconfigures to scenes dreamlike and surreal, with afterimages, reverberations and ambient fluidity reflecting the ambiguities of modern existence.

 

ai weiwei                             Nord Stream, 2022

Ai Weiwei’s Nord Stream (2022) uses a photograph of the whirlpool resulting from a ruptured Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline, taken by the Danish Ministry of Defense, as the base for its large-scale iteration in pixel-like Lego bricks, creating a link between the source and its wide-spread presence across digital media. Captured southeast of the Danish island of Bornholm on September 27, 2022, a day after the leak began, the aerial view encapsulates over two decades of heated international relations, and brings to mind the artist’s own career-long political involvement and activism. In using a seemingly playful, readily accessible medium, Ai leverages the colorful bricks’ approachability to draw attention to a critical moment, while employing their playful associations to give rise to tension between the material’s expected levity and the crucial, yet fragmented, scene on view.

 

thomas bayrle                     And Back Again – Helke II, 1991

Emerging in the 1960s from the visual languages of contemporary graphic design, advertising and mechanized weaving, Thomas Bayrle’s practice leveraged the mass-produced object and networks of infrastructure as tools for portraiture. Instrumental to this process was what he dubbed the Superform: A method of assembling series of repeated motifs to a larger image. In And Back Again – Helke II (1991), Bayrle presents a portrait of his wife, the Superform’s component parts here separated and flattened. No longer readily readable as a human likeness, the work takes on an abstraction rare for the artist, its optically rich patterning sending the gaze into a frenzy of misdirection. 

 

andreas eriksson                 Lidköping No. 10, 2024

Employing a diverse archive of linens and silks, Andreas Eriksson’s Lidköping No. 10 (2024) builds upon the artist’s signature fields of color, translated to a hand-woven tapestry, augmented by organic, fringe-like inclusions. Threads emerge from the composition’s ground, draping over and sporadically masking its textured surface to cascade downward. They appear as if unraveled from their sources, yet upon closer inspection, are revealed to be intentional inclusions methodically ordered along an unseen grid, evolved from and expanding the principles of his painted works.

Andreas Eriksson, Lidköping No. 10, 2024
© Andreas Eriksson. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

linen, silk
77 x 46.5 cm

mario garcía torres              When Stillness Produces Beautiful Moments, n.d.

Mario García Torres’ sculptural work When Stillness Produces Beautiful Moments (n.d.) is a poignant tribute to Alighiero Boetti – the Italian conceptualist to whom the artist has dedicated a number of crucial projects throughout his career. Here, García Torres takes as his point of departure Boetti’s Autoritratto (Mi Fuma Il Cervello) (1993 – 1994) – a self-portrait in which a bronze garden hose arcs water onto its head, where the stream meets heating elements and quickly turns to steam. García Torres’ work reduces Boetti’s selfportrait to just its hose, forming a monument to absence left in the wake of his outsized impact, and a testament to transformation and the vaporous nature of thought.

Mario García Torres,
When Stillness Produces Beautiful Moments, n.d.
bronze, copper
117 x 180 x 65 cm

© Mario García Torres. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

isa genzken                        Wolfgang, 1998

Isa Genzken’s Wolfgang (1998) is part of a series of sculptural works by the artist in which she assembles metallic and wooden panels to columns that tower above a viewer in approximations of contemporary architecture and its sleek glass exteriors. In Wolfgang, sterile mesh plates and warm-toned boards of fine-grained wood alternate as they ascend the monolith, revealing and concealing the structure’s barren interior in measured intervals. The layers of perforated material give rise to a moiré pattern that complicates the work’s strict structure, countering the principles of Modernism with contrasting, individualized modes of perception. 

 

shilpa gupta                         Untitled, 2016

Plumes of dense smoke waft through the 12 panels of Shilpa Gupta’s photographic work Untitled (2016), where curled apparitions take on shapes indefinite and infinite, dodging focus as they emerge from the edges of each composition. As much of Gupta’s work, Untitled too addresses the paradox of definitions, in particular the arbitrary nature of borders and the methods with which they are often drawn and enforced. Evocative of clouds, the pictured smoke is granted free passage into the domestic, its very presence the deconstruction of traditional divides.

Shilpa Gupta,
Untitled, 2016
digital photograph printed on Photo Rag paper
12 parts: 43 x 33 cm each

© Shilpa Gupta. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

louise lawler                       What Is Painting (swiped), 2022/2023

Louise Lawler’s What Is Painting (swiped) (2022/2023) – part of a series of photographs distorted by her moving camera and its open shutter – sees the bright canvas and dark lettering of John Baldessari’s What Is Painting? (1966 – 1968) blur as if in dynamic motion. Spatially shifted, or “swiped,” Lawler’s action enters into conversation with Baldessari’s. She counters the painting’s semi-ironic message through layers of appropriation and reinterpretation, and in turn, interrogates the conditions of authorship, institutional display and canonization.

 

sharon lockhart                   Untitled, 2023

A mid-winter landscape as it rises gently before the camera, obscuring the approach to the sea that sits behind it, features in Sharon Lockhart’s Untitled (2023). Tall grasses, rendered pale by the season’s set-in chill, are coated in airy layers of falling snow. Fog looms, creating a nearly empty sky – the image’s intricately textured lower segment starkly contrasts the void that lies above it, masking the world that presumably lies beyond. Here, Lockhart re-engages with the seascapes and shorelines that have pervaded her practice for the past decades in a musing on a relentless, life-sustaining, yet unknowable force.

Sharon Lockhart,
Untitled, 2023
framed chromogenic print
83.3 x 104 cm

© Sharon Lockhart. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

tobias rehberger                 Utagawa Kunisada Shiko no nagame 1829 I, 2015

The vibrantly colored mural in Tobias Rehberger’s Utagawa Kunisada Shiko no nagame 1829 I (2015) sees a pixelated image, coded and imperceptible until viewed from a distance or reduced to fit a screen. Only then do the oversized, square-shaped modules merge to an facsimile of an erotic Japanese shunga woodcut. This print sits behind a vase that, clad in this same motif, seemingly disappears against its background, camouflaging itself while remaining in plain sight, thus allowing Rehberger to interrogate how context informs object’s impact and allows it to transform. 

 

tomás saraceno                  Wayra 246, 2025

Tomás Saraceno’s Wayra 246 (2025), a sculptural network of solid-glass polyhedrons composed to cloud-like clusters of interconnected modules, appear to exist at the intersection of air, water and earth. The work’s suspended structures intertwine and seem to physically support one another through their shared facets, prompting questions on notions of space, order and symbiosis. Here, Saraceno juxtaposes the static nature of sculptural forms and the organic movement of natural systems, while the faces’ enigmatic transparency hints at the fluidity of boundaries and the interdependence of systems and their surroundings.

 

simon starling                      Pin Board Painting, 2021

In the meticulously constructed, two-part installation Pin Board Painting (2021), Simon Starling takes as a point of departure an early 20th-century installation view from what was then the Berliner Nationalgalerie in Berlin (today the Alte Nationalgalerie), recreating this once-miniscule catalog reproduction in magnified form using black push-pins. The countless pins are precisely clustered such that their round heads emulate an offset print’s method of rendering an image. Re-photographed and shrunk back to the image’s initial dimensions as discovered in its source, the inserted push-pins begin to visually coalesce, forming what appears as the original installation photograph, and in turn crafting a commentary on the subjectivity of the image. 

Simon Starling,
Pin Board Painting, 2021

left: 75:1 Scale Reproduction of a Detail of an Installation View of Adolph Menzel’s The Artist’s Bedroom, 1847; push-pins, softboard,
paper, wood; 242.2 x 187.2 x 9.5 cm

right: 75:1 Scale Reproduction of a Detail of an Installation View of Adolph Menzel, The Artist’s
Bedroom, 1847 (Re-photographed and Returned to its Original Printed Size); silver gelatin contact print; 57.3 x 47.3 x 3.8 cm

© Simon Starling. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

With her tapestry Noisy Calm, November (2025), Pae White returns to the elaborate process of translating the ephemeral to woven materials, paying tribute to the natural world’s splendor. To reinterpret the tradition-rich, labor-intensive, enduring technique of weaving, she fabricates a digital image using an industrial Jacquard loom in a clash of media and theme. Here, threads of cotton and polyester capture the elusive by way of a lakefront landscape. Softened behind low-lying mist, the articulated image begins to dissolve, suspended between representation and abstraction, inscrutable and barely tangible. 

Let’s Play Majerus G3 LIVE – Artistic Practices in the Digital Age
Live Performance by Cory Arcangel & Conversation with Nadim Samman

3 MAY 2025, 12 pm

At Michel Majerus Estate
Knaackstrasse 12
10405 Berlin 

The event will be held in English.
No registration required. Please note that seating is limited.

The Michel Majerus Estate is excited to present a live performance by Cory Arcangel, followed by a conversation between Arcangel and curator Nadim Samman. This event summarizes and culminates the artist’s seminal project, Let’s Play Majerus G3. Here, Arcangel activates Michel Majerus’ laptop, offering a real-time look into the emulation technology behind the project, and unique insights into Majerus’ digital studio. 

Arcangel and Samman will then discuss the project and the presence of the Digital in contemporary art practices since the 2000s. Following the release of the fifth and final video in Arcangel’s YouTube series, this exclusive performance and conversation completes the project Let’s Play Majerus G3, alongside the complementary exhibition at the Michel Majerus Estate in Berlin. Attendees will have the special opportunity to experience this project directly, and to come into conversation with Arcangel and Samman during a Q&A afterward. 

 

Let’s Play Majerus G3

This event is part of the current exhibition Let’s Play Majerus G3  at the Michel Majerus

Estate (Knaackstr. 12,10405 Berlin), which places works by Michel Majerus and Cory Arcangel in dialog. At the center of the exhibition is a still unexplored part of Michel Majerus’ estate: a Macintosh PowerBook G3 that Majerus used until 2002. On the initiative of the artist Cory Arcangel and in collaboration with Rhizome, a platform for digital art and culture, this laptop has been reactivated through emulation. In the format of “Let’s Play” videos on YouTube, which can be viewed both online and in the exhibition, Arcangel provides an insight into the computer and unfamiliar aspects of Majerus’ creative process. The project provides access to Majerus’ digital studio for the first time – from the perspective of a fellow artist.

Let’s Play Majerus G3 was conceived in collaboration with Rhizome. The emulation of Majerus’ computer, developed by OpenSLX, was supervised by Dragan Espenschied (Preservation Director at Rhizome) and Mona Ulrich. The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IfCAR) at Zurich University of the Arts, and Arcangel Surfware, a software and merchandise publisher founded by the artist in 2014, are supporting the project.

Cory Arcangel
Let’s Play Majerus G3

27 APR 2024 until 4 MAY 2025
Michel Majerus Estate
Knaackstraße 12
10405 Berlin

The Michel Majerus Estate is pleased to announce Let’s Play Majerus G3, a project featuring a previously unexplored aspect of the artist’s archive: his computer. An initiative led by artist Cory Arcangel, Let’s Play Majerus G3 takes as its point of departure the laptop that Majerus used in his late career, now reactivated following a restoration undertaken in cooperation with digital-art organization Rhizome.
By examining this crucial tool, Let’s Play Majerus G3 — an expansive program comprising the exhibition at the Michel Majerus Estate, a talk, a performance and a YouTube series — allows unprecedented access to Majerus’ digital studio and the approaches that informed it, representing a revolutionary development in the understanding of his oeuvre, and allowing a uniquely first-hand glimpse, through the eyes of a fellow artist, into this rich primary source.

Cory Arcangel
Foto/ Photo: Tim Barber

As culture itself becomes increasingly digitized, more and more of it will end up in drawers like this — discarded, forgotten, and inoperable. 

– Cory Arcangel in Artforum, summer 2014

While their respective practices began nearly a decade apart, and despite the disparate nature of their media, Majerus and Arcangel are united by a core interest in the aesthetics of digital imagery, the generative potential of new technologies, critique of said technologies and the free traversal of analog and digital worlds.

In 2022, Kunstverein in Hamburg staged Data Streaming, an exhibition that showcased a selection of late work by Majerus, and probed how the increasing presence of the digital in the late 1990s profoundly impacted his practice. On view concurrently with Arcangel’s presentation Flying Foxes, the pairing of shows brought the dialogue between the two artists to the fore, drawing attention to the brief moment in which their practices overlapped.

Bildschirmfoto einer Photoshop datei / Screenshot of photoshop file on Michel Majerus’ laptop (Powerbook G3)
Aufgenommen von / selected by Cory Arcangel, Nov. 2024

© Michel Majerus Estate, 2024

Bildschirmfoto einer Photoshop datei / Screenshot of photoshop file on Michel Majerus’ laptop (Powerbook G3)
Aufgenommen von / selected by Cory Arcangel, Nov. 2024

© Michel Majerus Estate, 2024

Using emulation developed by Dragan Espenschied and Mona Ulrich from Rhizome, Arcangel here reactivates Majerus’ laptop (a 1998 Macintosh PowerBook G3) — a tool that Majerus spent significant time with on a daily basis, conceiving works and exhibitions, assembling his schedule, conducting communication and experimenting with software. Arcangel’s project highlights Majerus’ use of the then-burgeoning internet, the scale, speed, accessibility and autonomy of which opened new doors for artists, and affords a singularly comprehensive look at his digital studio. Within the emulation environment, Majerus’ computer exists as the artist last used it, exactly as it stood in 2002, providing detailed insight into his process of conception, production and display, with files ranging from sketches of future works to exhibition views of them in their realized forms.

Arcangel’s work is driven by the temporality and technological dependence of aesthetics, with modern-day technology constituting, in a broad sense, a key advancement in human history — a chronology that includes everything from musical instruments of the Renaissance to contemporary video games. Among a generation of artists distinguished by the integration of new media in their practices, Arcangel’s early negotiation of a digital present stands as exceptional.

His engagement with archival computing here builds upon a 2014 project in which he, together with several organizations including the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club — a team specializing in obsolete computers — accessed over 30-year-old floppy discs from the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, rescuing a group of long-lost digital works by the artist.

The project at the Michel Majerus Estate, in exploring and presenting Majerus’ computer, foregrounds the technological challenge of re-accessing a wealth of information thought to be lost. It lends consideration to the increasingly prominent role of archiving digital materials and interrogates the ways in which these holdings crucially factor into authoring arthistorical narratives surrounding 21st-century protagonists.

Let’s Play Majerus G3 is accompanied by an in-person and online program. The exhibition at the Michel Majerus Estate features works by Arcangel that span nearly two decades, including new commissions displayed alongside selected works by Majerus in a juxtaposition that suggests a continuity in non-concurrent, albeit conceptually linked, bodies of work.

On YouTube, Arcangel — in his debut as a “YouTuber” — posts “Let’s Play” videos that feature him as he navigates Majerus’ computer as part of this project. These videos are also presented on the Michel Majerus Estate’s website and by Rhizome as part of their series of presentations on digital-art archival, “ArtBase Anthologies.”

The project is accompanied by a conversation between Cory Arcangel and Dragan Espenschied during Gallery Weekend Berlin, followed by a new iteration of Arcangel’s performance The AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound (2015 – ongoing) in fall 2024, and a series of events with Rhizome conducted over the course of the exhibition.

neugerriemschneider
Linienstrasse 155
10115 Berlin

+49 (0) 30 2887 7277
neugerriemschneider
Christinenstraße 18-19
10119 Berlin

+49 (0)30 2887 7277
READ ON
neugerriemschneider
in process…
Daniel Birnbaum on
Olafur Eliasson
neugerriemschneider
in process...
Laura Hoptman on Isa Genzken
neugerriemschneider
...finalized
with Olafur Eliasson
neugerriemschneider
...finalized
Lisa Lee on Isa Genzken
neugerriemschneider
in process…
Martin Clark on Billy Childish
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...finalized
Matthew Higgs on Billy Childish
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in process…
Kit Hammonds on Mario García Torres
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...finalized
with Mario García Torres
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in process...
James S. Snyder on Noa Eshkol
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in process...
Jenelle Porter on Pae White
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...finalized
with Pae White
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...finalized
Mooky Dagan on Noa Eshkol
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...finalized
with Andreas Eriksson
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in process...
Erika Balsom on James Benning
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...finalized
with James Benning
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in process...
Jan Tumlir on Jorge Pardo
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...finalized
with Jorge Pardo
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Rebecca Lamarch-Vadel on Tomás Saraceno
neugerriemschneider
…finalized
with Tomás Saraceno
neugerriemschneider
in process...
Mark Godfrey on Simon Starling
neugerriemschneider
...finalized
with Simon Starling
neugerriemschneider
in process...
Sabine Eckmann on Sharon Lockhart
neugerriemschneider
in process...
Massimiliano Giono on Pawel Althamer
neugerriemschneider
...finalized
with Pawel Althamer
neugerriemschneider
...finalized
with Sharon Lockhart
neugerriemschneider
in process…
Ulrike Groos on Tobias Rehberger
neugerriemschneider
in process…
Matthias Mühling on Thomas Bayrle
neugerriemschneider
… finalized
with Tobias Rehberger
neugerriemschneider
… finalized
with Thomas Bayrle
neugerriemschneider
in process…
Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau on Billy Childish
neugerriemschneider
...finalized
with Billy Childish
neugerriemschneider
in process…
Luca Cerizza on Thilo Heinzmann
neugerriemschneider
in process…
Justine Ludwig on Shilpa Gupta
neugerriemschneider
… finalized with Shilpa Gupta
neugerriemschneider
in process …
Stephanie Seidel and Alex Gartenfeld on Michel Majerus
neugerriemschneider
in process… Meredith Malone on Thaddeus Strode
neugerriemschneider
… finalized
with Thaddeus Strode
neugerriemschneider
… finalized 
with Thilo Heinzmann
neugerriemschneider
in process … 
the power and pleasure of books and possessions
neugerriemschneider
finalized … the power and pleasure of books and possessions
neugerriemschneider
finalized… with Andreas Eriksson
neugerriemschneider
finalized… with Renata Lucas
neugerriemschneider
in process… Iwona Blazwick on Jorge Pardo
Ai Weiwei at neugerriemschneider
neugerriemschneider
Ai Weiwei
Know Thyself
neugerriemschneider
Gallery Weekend Berlin 2024
Renata Lucas, Andreas Eriksson, Rirkrit Tiravanija & Cory Arcangel
neugerriemschneider
Gallery Night 2024
Group show, Udomsak Krisanamis, Noa Eshkol, Cory Arcangel
neugerriemschneider
Simon Starling
Project for an Exhibition, Part 1: Time Takes (Scenario for a Conversation) 
Gallery Weekend Berlin 2025
neugerriemschneider presents
Thomas Bayrle; Olafur Eliasson; Group show
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