Markus Linnenbrink 2025 by Miles McEnery Gallery

MARKUS LINNENBRINK: ART AND TECHNOLOGY

By Matthew Biro

“Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. ... Such a realm is art.” 1

—Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954)

To the casual eye, Markus Linnenbrink’s paintings seem intuitive and abstract, concerned with formal questions and the history of modernist and postmodernist nonobjective art. Yet if we look deeper, they reveal themselves to be deeply conceptual, raising questions about the nature of perception and consciousness in our increasingly commodified and networked worlds. Simultaneously formal and political, Linnenbrink’s works engage our eyes, asking us to consider the relationship between vision and technology, as well as the various dangers and possibilities that this relationship creates.

To best understand Linnenbrink, we must first acknowledge him as the dedicated painter he is. Linnenbrink is an obsessive creator who seeks to give his viewers predominantly visual experiences—lingering contemplations of lines, gestures, and colors—evoked by a diverse array of painterly “objects.”

His vibrant, mobile, and highly optical creations include “traditional” paintings (wall mounted and rectangular), as well as three-dimensional sculptures, painted ready-mades, ceramics, installations, and environments. Outdoor murals, as well as painted sound barriers and floors, are also part of the mix.2 Although his works range in format from discrete objects to overarching environments, they are all motivated by similar concerns, and they are sometimes installed to be experienced as interactive ensembles.

1Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 6th ed. (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1990), 39. Originally published 1954. English translation: “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 35.

As all his works demonstrate, Linnenbrink is interested in encouraging spectators to fall into a dreamlike state of consciousness in which we question and reimagine everything we see. Through the intense interaction of gesture, color, movement, chance, and form, Linnenbrink’s art encourages its viewers to get lost in trippy reveries—psychedelic experiences of vision as a constant process of creative activity and change. And if Linnenbrink’s complex installations and environments sometimes become backgrounds for other activities—human interactions in a multiplicity of different forms—the artist is happy about this as well, believing that new environments can inspire new behaviors, new lifestyles, and new ways of being and interacting. He wants you to think about and contemplate his art, but he also wants his abstract world to be a place where you meet one another, listen to music, eat, drink, and party.3

For much of his career, Linnenbrink has explored a unique painterly medium: different hues of pigment suspended in epoxy resin over wood. Using a wide variety of vibrant, saturated colors, he varies his methods of application, as well as what he does to his hallucinatory optical surfaces after they cure and harden.4

To make his drip paintings, the artist pours rivulets of colored epoxy down the flat planes of his supports to form vertically articulated fields. Morphing between screen and veil, these works mix the subjectivity of the artist’s hand and the individuality of the chromatic choices he makes with the nonhuman rhythms and materialities of the mechanized industrialized processes that he has used to make his artwork. (His non-compositional strategy of the repeated drip or flow of colored epoxy, for example, depends as much on gravity and viscosity as it does on his own hand.) Helping to transform the artist’s studio into a quasi-factory, these shimmering and translucent curtains (sheets of acid rain?)

2On his increasingly important installations and environments, which he has been creating for more than three decades, see Linnenbrink’s website: https://markuslinnenbrink.com/installations#/everythingbetweenthesunandthedirt-2023/

3Conversations with artist: September 28, 2024, Brooklyn, NY; and January 3, 2025, conducted on Zoom.

4Linnenbrink talks about his art as materially driven. “It was always material-driven in a way. By the end [of my student years], in Berlin, I made my own oil paint out of pigment, with a glass grinder on a piece of safety glass I found.” Interview by Frédéric Caillard, November 2017. https://www.patriciasweetowgallery.com/press/markus-linnenbrink-the-interview/

form windows onto a flowing environment that simultaneously celebrates and undermines subjectivity. Here, the line—the basic artistic gesture—morphs into an acid-tinged vibration, an invitation to investigate an endless visual overload and the hallucinations that arise in its wake.

To make other epoxy paintings, Linnenbrink erects a temporary frame on a table or on the floor, a structure into which he pours and mixes quantities of viscous pigment, building up layers over time. (Suggesting a kind of techno-environmentalism, Linnenbrink recycles the excess epoxy-pigment amalgam that flows off his drips to produce other works.) After finishing the pouring and layering process and allowing it to set, the artist uses a router to drill holes or to cut lines into the faces of these paintings to reveal different strata of color. (He calls the former “drills” and the latter “cuts.”) In still other paintings, termed “reverse paintings,” Linnenbrink pours his colors onto an uneven vinyl plastic ground. The result is a cast surface that evokes frozen (almost geographical or topographical) forms and frenzied industrial activity—stasis and motion—at the same time. In still other iterations of the epoxy pigment paintings, he embeds family photographs (taken by his father) into the medium, bringing signs of childhood memory into his part-intentional, part-industrial painterly process.

For many viewers and critics, Linnenbrink’s paintings evoke metaphors of time, from the instantaneous to the epochal.5 In other words, the real-time temporalities of drips, flows, and the artist’s hands on the controls of a pneumatic industrial router are mixed with longer durations of time that are evoked by the archaeological-like layers created by Linnenbrink’s way of working. Linnenbrink’s painted and manipulated surfaces conjure geological time (the earth’s history), human time (moments of time in human history), and the artist’s actual lived time in the studio. In addition, his various modes of material manipulation—the linear stoke, the drip, the tape, the pour, and various forms of violent excision—recall a variety of different art historical antecedents while also referencing the development of different industrial materials and methods.

This sense of multiple time frames—and multiple things or beings—being superimposed within the image field is particularly apparent in the artist’s drill paintings. At first glance, they look almost like

5See in particular David Pagel, “Gestural Abstraction in the Information Age,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2017; and Derek Conrad Murray, “Markus Linnenbrink,” Art in America, February 23, 2010.

watery worlds (floating plants or simple organisms) or perhaps colonies of mold or cells seen under a microscope. On closer inspection, however, the circular forms reveal themselves to be tiny three-dimensional apertures disclosing strata from pigment poured on different days: a record of the artist’s daily practice over time. Besides presenting paradoxical images of development (the time it takes to make a painting, for example, or for the earth’s surface to develop a topography), the drill paintings also foreground surfaces disrupted by a highly instrumental and manipulative process. Perhaps this is a reference to the sometimes-threatening growth of industry and mass production that has been taking place since around 1870, when the second industrial revolution began.

Linnenbrink’s linear encaustics also engage with the perception of time, but in a much more organic and utopian way. Unlike many of the paintings for which he is best known (works that use an industrial, petroleum-based epoxy matrix), Linnenbrink’s encaustic paintings use an organic material to embed and preserve the colored pigments and other materials that the artist employs to create detailed, linear, and extremely smooth surfaces. To make these paintings, Linnenbrink generally starts with a white ground upon which he sometimes lays preexisting elements, like found fabrics (such as handkerchiefs or kitchen towels), all sourced from his household and suffused with personal memory. He then brushes melted beeswax over the elements before adding layers of lines, sometimes enabled by tapes that are removed after painting. Using beeswax as his substrate, the sweet-smelling building product of insects that are known for their organization and cooperation, Linnenbrink paints his surface with brushes, heat, and hot irons to create a palimpsest of multiple layers. On their most basic level, the encaustics are rhythmic articulations of lines. They construct visual fields that appear abstract and material, yet also evoke a sense of overheated consciousness by suggesting the sensation of depth as well as a flickering of multiple, conflicting viewpoints. Although machinelike elements remain in Linnenbrink’s encaustics, the effect the paintings produce is much more intimate and utopian: They seem to suggest a hope that humanity will not destroy itself through its own technology. As is the case with Linnenbrink’s epoxy resin paintings, however, there is a taught dialectic between human and machine in his encaustics, one that questions hard divisions between nature and culture instead of trying to enforce them.

Markus Linnenbrink, STOOPSALE THONET KIDS I, 2021, Epoxy resin, pigments, wood chair, 23 x 15 x 13 inches (58 x 38 x 33 cm)

Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair (Fettstuhl), 1964-85, Wood, glass, metal, fabric, paint, fat and thermometer, 72 x 61 x 25.2 inches (183 x 155 x 64 cm)

Although Linnenbrink has been painting longer than he has been sculpting, his sculptural work is no less central to his art. Paint-spattered chairs, which are sometimes provided at his exhibitions, are there to ease contemplation and to encourage spectators to sit and take their time. But the chairs also refer to Linnenbrink’s ready-mades, and as such they remind us of the conceptual turn in the history of modern and avant-garde art, revealing Linnenbrink’s deep knowledge of the chair form in contemporary art, from their use by artists from Marcel Duchamp to Joseph Beuys. The chairs also represent the body and its adaptation to the built environment—and by implication modern industrial societies. These are the issues with which Linnenbrink’s paintings grapple. Linnenbrink also makes plastic globes, like marbles discarded by giant children, into which he has sunk numerous forms of common mementos. They are translucent images of a world in crisis, evoking the earth spinning out of control and the ever-growing accretion of discarded commodities.

Linnenbrink’s magnificent large ceramics, like his encaustics, radiate more optimistic associations. They conjure idealized if fragmented body parts, channeling a history of sculptural representation that stretches back to ancient times. But they also look like parts of a growing rhizome, a slowly evolving life form encapsulated by a candy-like and variegated crust. With their nonnatural colors, and

Markus Linnenbrink, GAMELANDTIMECURVE, 2020-2021, Epoxy resin and pigments, wood, metal, foam, 69 x 47 x 50 inches (175 x 119 x 127 cm)

their all-over optical, free-associative articulations, Linnenbrink’s ceramics invite cosmic meditation. Staring at their surfaces is like staring at the nighttime sky: We begin to see shifting constellations of beings and things. But the quirky humor of their shapes also reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously; imagination is growth and play, they suggest, and there is no final interpretation.

There are many artistic lineages in which we can productively situate Linnenbrink’s work. The complex relationship between painting, photography, and mass production has, for a long time, been a critical subject for contemporary art. Yet what makes Linnenbrink unique, I think, is the way he combines a focus on abstract and industrial image making with a quasi-Dada and surrealist desire to create contexts for self-liberation and human community. He wants to change the way you see, and he begins by calling for an active and community-oriented spectator, one who wants to think deeply about how technology affects our vision, and thus our lives.

Matthew Biro is a professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1998), The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (2009), Anselm Kiefer (2013), and Robert Heinecken and the Art of Appropriation (2022). His reviews of contemporary art, film, and photography have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Contemporary, Art Papers, and The New Art Examiner.