On personal archives and the subtle influence of design, music and memory on art-making.
MARC BRANDENBURG is not only a chronicler of our times through his art, but also a collector of significant objects spanning the worlds of fashion, music and film. For SLEEK, he has selected seven objects that hold personal memories while also representing a broader understanding of their respective eras, the social and cultural realities in which they are embedded, and the way they ultimately lead back to Brandenburg’s own artistic practice and process as an artist. His work spans graphic art, collage, installation, video and performance. At its core are detailed pencil drawings based on photographs that he captures during his wanderings or samples from magazines, films and books.
“I’m a rather obsessive collector. I collect records, books, films, objects. Even a seemingly useless action figure like Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange says an awful lot about my aesthetic influences. In its rigour, the figure represents one of my absolute favourite looks. Punk and skin head culture drew heavily on this: bowler hats, boots, military influences. But it’s also simply the figure’s detailed design, where every crease makes sense. The film as a whole is a classic and, more than ever in the age of Palantir, highly relevant: total surveillance, control, manipulation of behaviour and moral decay in society.”
What connects all these objects is a certain clarity of design and meaning. Nothing appears unnecessarily overloaded; everything is reduced, focused and precise. It is this quality that is so crucial in Brandenburg’s works: pieces that are both complex and dense, yet arise from something as simple as the line of a pencil. Yet this is also where the glitch sets in. The closer one gets to the structure of what is depicted, the clearer a sense that something isn’t quite right. The image is reversed, the monochrome shifts perception, and yet everything seems perfectly coherent. Like Vivienne Westwood’s muslin T-shirt, now regarded as a cultural icon, which sparked a small revolution in the 1970s. Breasts on a T-shirt shocked the uptight society of the time and gave a new generation an object that was both simple and radical, opening up space for a more open understanding of self, sexuality and society: “This is one of the most famous punk shirts of all time. The 1977 boob motif from Seditionaries, the shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. The two not only shaped my style, but dominated subcultural fashion from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. It wasn’t just clothing; their designs symbolised a completely new attitude.”
Brandenburg’s sense of self stems from precisely this period, from an early awareness of the power and joy that fashion can generate. An early influence was his mother. He still remembers her bright green Christian Dior platform shoes to this day: “Even as a child, clothing was something very conscious for me. Not superficial, but something through which one expresses identity. I went to school in bondage trousers, kilts, bleached hair and T-shirts with pornographic motifs or political slogans. That was quite extreme back then. A time when almost everyone was still wearing huge collars over ribbed turtlenecks.”
The closer one gets to the structure of what is depicted, the clearer a sense that something isn’t quite right.
Today, Brandenburg tends to work with subtle contrasts, fully aware that society still functions largely within fixed categories. He wears his favourite brooch, a gift from a close friend, which now appears larger than life in his current exhibition 20th Century Debris at the Berlinische Galerie. The piece features voluptuous red lips made from crystal stones, with white pearls forming teeth: “The brooch is based on Mae West’s mouth and was designed by Dalí. I like to cause confusion. You don’t see many older men wearing sparkling brooches. But it is exactly this slight shift in expectations that interests me. Of course, I always hope that my work is perceived in this way. I love the subtle. Glitches or moments that briefly throw you off balance.”
Since the early 1990s, his immediate surroundings, his friends, and culturally formative moments and personalities have formed the heart of his visual references. Through the process of drawing, snapshots are translated into monochrome, complex works that simultaneously create a sense of closeness and distance. The images feel like dreamlike memories, with blurred edges, close-ups and angles that of ten evoke a feeling rather than a concrete object: “One of the most important books for me is From A to B and Back Again by Andy Warhol. There’s a chapter called The Tingle; it’s a recorded telephone conversation between Andy Warhol and Brigid Polk. In it, she describes in obsessive detail exactly how she cleans her bathroom. But actually, it’s not really about cleaning at all, but about her mental state. My drawings serve a similar function. Through this obsessive precision, one also conveys something emotional or psychological. The motifs never speak just for themselves.”
Brandenburg works predominantly in small formats. He explains that he has never had a traditional studio; but works wherever he happens to be. This keeps the scale of his works flexible and portable. Through the use of inversion, the reversal of light and dark values, light and shadow themselves become lines within the drawing. This shift lends the works a poetic dimension and transforms fragments of personal life into an archive of their time. Music has always played a central role in this and points to many of the themes in Brandenburg’s work: the contradictions of metropolitan life, social injustice, excess and consumerism as symptoms of late capitalism. These are also themes explored by the band Throbbing Gristle, which Brandenburg has brought along in the form of an inconspicuous little loudspeaker:
“This is a Buddha Machine featuring loops by Throbbing Gristle, the pioneers of industrial music. They were much more than just a band; they were more like a hardcore artist collective. The group, particularly Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, were also absolute style icons. This particular Buddha Machine was developed by FM3, a Chinese electronic duo, in collaboration with the artists, and classic Throbbing Gristle tracks were transformed into droning loops that continue until you’ve had enough. Sometimes you don’t want to hear melodies or voices, but simply a sound that creates atmosphere, much like my film loops with slowed-down audio. I’m interested in artists where style, politics and experimentation come together, like the Silicon Chip record by Basement 5, one of my absolute favourite post-punk bands from the late 70s. An incredible Blade Runner aesthetic, dub, political: the music still feels entirely current almost 50 years later.”
In conversation, it becomes clear not only how relevant many of these references remain, but also how closely these objects are linked both to one another and to Brandenburg’s artistic practice, sometimes consciously, sometimes as an extended layer, like one pencil stroke laid upon another. It is his unique perspective on the world that blurs arbitrary boundaries and brings out the essential. In this sense, the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens also fits perfectly into the picture: “That’s one of my favourite films. It’s about Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale, Big Edie and Little Edie for short. Two society women, aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy, who lived in a Hamptons villa that fell increasingly into disrepair after they ran out of money. It’s the story of a mother and daughter living together in a single room with a bunch of cats, surviving on crackers and ice cream eaten with knives. They argued all day long and then put on a performance for each other. The most important thing about the film is the consistently respectful way it portrays the two. It never makes fun of them. It is a masterpiece about high and low, elegance and decay, art and freedom. Edie later even became a fashion icon because she completely improvised and deconstructed clothing: a mixture of elegance, improvisation and concealment.”
As in his drawings, connections emerge here between seemingly casual objects and explicit, intimate moments. From this arises a rhythm that feels remarkably honest. Today, he lives between Berlin and Barcelona and continues to maintain his archive as a chronicler of our times: an archive of images, memories, subculture and the subtle shifts that reveal just how closely personal stories and social realities are intertwined.
Wie vorgestellt in SLEEK #89 – PLAY
MARC BRANDENBURG *(1965) is regarded as one of the most important contemporary graphic artist. His practice encompasses drawing, collage, installation, video and performance. 20th Century Debris is on show at Berlinische Galerie until 14.9.26.
Kredite
Photo 1/ 4: © MARC BRANDENBURG, photo: CHROMA Studio Berlin – ANDRÉ CARVALHO. ULRICH GHEZZI, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul
Photo 5: © MARC BRANDENBURG, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, photo: CHROMA Studio Berlin – ANDRÉ CARVALHO
Photo 3/ 7: © MARC BRANDENBURG, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul, photo: CHROMA Studio Berlin – ANDRÉ CARVALHO
Photo 2/ 6: © MARC BRANDENBURG, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul, photo: CHROMA Studio Berlin – ANDRÉ CARVALHO (2)