Michel Majerus Estate
Knaackstrasse 12 | 10405 Berlin
Upcoming Event:
Saturday, September 13, 2025
12 pm
Screening:
Michel Majerus, Meine Sicht auf Polke, Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, September 9, 1997 (in German, with English subtitles)
Lecture:
Susanne Kleine (Curator, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn) (in German)
– For more information, please see below –
Current
Lectures on Lectures
Screenings and Guest Lectures
with Susanne Kleine, Sarah Johanna Theurer, and others
September 2025 – February 2026
Michel Majerus Estate, Berlin
From September 2025 to February 2026, the Michel Majerus Estate presents the event series Lectures on Lectures, which focuses on three lectures delivered by Michel Majerus between 1997 and 2000. These will be publicly screened for the first time in the form of video recordings from the artist’s estate and contextualized through guest lectures and discussions. Alongside these events, works by Majerus that are thematically and visually related to the historical lectures will be displayed at the Michel Majerus Estate.
At the invitation of institutions and art academies, Majerus developed lectures that transcended the conventional boundaries of the format through their experimental style. Merging spoken word, image, and music, his associative multimedia arrangements can be retrospectively considered as lecture performances. Mirroring his approach to painting, Majerus employed techniques of pictorial citation and recontextualization, revealing a previously unknown aspect of his artistic practice in these rare instances of public self-reflection.
The archive of the artist’s estate contains numerous examples of Majerus’ interest in moving images and the use of recording devices as working tools. Since the mid-1990s, he extensively filmed his studio environments, preparations for shows, the installation of exhibitions, as well as everyday moments. This practice resulted in a large collection of filmic material, ranging from the documentation of his own works to impressions of architecture, urban spaces, as well as advertisements, TV series, and video games.
In his lectures, Majerus combined this material into moving image collages, accompanied by spoken commentary, which together offer insights into his artistic methodology and understanding of his practice: an unfolding stream of consciousness that embeds his works into a constantly shifting matrix of references. The lectures reveal his non-hierarchical engagement with references, offering an intimate entry point into the complexity of his multifaceted painterly and installational œuvre.
Coinciding with the launch of Lectures on Lectures, Majerus’ early work will be on view this fall at neugerriemschneider as well as Matthew Marks Gallery. While noch ein bild (September 12 – October 18, 2025) in Berlin takes as its subject the late years of the artist’s studies, the New York exhibition will feature large-format canvases painted between 1991 and 1993, and a selection of works produced in Berlin from 1995. Together, the pairing of shows forms a concise picture of Majerus’ practice in its formative years, presenting a uniquely developed visual vocabulary that had its institutional debut in 1996 at Kunsthalle Basel.
Program of Lectures on Lectures
The events will take place in the exhibition space of the Michel Majerus Estate. Admission is free, and no registration is required. We kindly ask for your understanding that seating capacity will be limited.
Saturday, September 13, 2025
12 pm
Screening:
Michel Majerus, Meine Sicht auf Polke, Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, September 9, 1997 (in German, with English subtitles)
Lecture:
Susanne Kleine (Curator, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn) (in German)
Meine Sicht auf Polke [My View on Polke] is a performative engagement by Majerus with the work of Sigmar Polke as part of a series of events that accompanied the 1997 exhibition, Sigmar Polke: Die drei Lügen der Malerei, at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. Majerus projected excerpts from the TV series Urmel aus dem Eis (1969) and the video game Super Mario 64 (1996 Japan/US, 1997 Europe) onto two paintings by Polke, connecting them with a lecture on his own artistic strategies and questions surrounding the accelerated production of images in the present, the relevance of images, and art reception.
Curator Susanne Kleine, who supported and accompanied Majerus’ practice from the outset, invited him to participate in 1997, and will also reflect on the connection between the two artists in her lecture.
Saturday, November 22, 2025
12 pm
Screening:
Michel Majerus, Beschleunigung I, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, February 25, 1999 (no language)
Lecture:
Sarah Johanna Theurer (Curator, Haus der Kunst, Munich) (in English)
For the lecture series Malerei in der Gegenwart [Painting in the Present] at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Majerus screened the video presentation Beschleunigung I in 1999, invited by the student body of the Art History Institute. Scenes from his studio and exhibition installations alternate with shots from urban spaces as well as everyday moments and pop culture motifs such as escalators, transportation, video games, advertising, and graffiti. Accompanied by a continuous techno soundtrack, this dense, multi-rhythmically structured video collage offers both an associative and immediate insight into Majerus’ artistic process and his expanded concept of painting.
Curator Sarah Johanna Theurer, who has previously engaged with the theme of rhythm in the artist’s work, will offer perspective into the unique relationship between image and music in Majerus’ œuvre.
Saturday, February 21, 2026
12 pm
Screening:
Lecture of Michel Majerus at Pasadena ArtCenter, Los Angeles, November 20, 2000 (in English)
As part of a fellowship at Pasadena ArtCenter in the United States, Majerus spoke in 2000 to students about his artistic approach. He presented a multipart projection in the background, collaging images from his own exhibitions, artistic references, and sources of inspiration into a layered composition.
Susanne Kleine is a German art historian and curator at the Bundeskunsthalle since 1994, specializing in contemporary art and art since 1945. She studied art history, education and theatre, film, and television studies at the Albertus Magnus University in Cologne, completing her Master’s thesis on the artist group Mülheimer Freiheit. After working as assistant to Stefan Wewerka, Rosemarie Trockel, and Georg Herold, she held senior positions at Galerie Tanja Grunert in Cologne as well as Galerie Max Hetzler in Cologne and Berlin. In addition to teaching positions at Ruhr University Bochum, the University of Bonn, and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Susanne Kleine served as a mentor in the Art Criticism and Curatorial Knowledge program at Ruhr University Bochum between 2010 and 2013. Since 2020, she has been a mentor in the Mentoring@KuK program for Art Mediation and Cultural Management at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Susanne Kleine is also active as an independent curator, author, and juror.
Sarah Johanna Theurer is a curator and writer focusing on time-based art practices and techno-social entanglements. At Haus der Kunst in Munich, she works to re-cast the exhibition as a responsive medium, working with artists such as Pan Daijing, Isabelle Lewis, Carsten Nicolai, Jenna Sutela, and WangShui. Her survey exhibitions are dedicated to trailblazing artists like Shu Lea Cheang (2025), Katalin Ladik (2023, with Hendrik Folkerts), and Fujiko Nakaya (2022, with Andrea Lissoni), for which she edited the first comprehensive catalogue. She further initiated Echoes, a live program tuning in to the sensuous dimensions of emerging technologies. Previously, she was the director of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler gallery, part of the team of the 9th Berlin Biennale, as well as transmediale Berlin. As a dramaturge she collaborated with performance groups including OMSK Social Club and The Agency. She hosted a show on the Berlin community radio Cashmere and regularly writes for catalogues and magazines.
Past
Let’s Play Majerus G3
a project by Cory Arcangel
April 27, 2024 – May 4, 2025
© Michel Majerus Estate, 2025
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.
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 art-historical 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 was accompanied by a public conversation between Cory Arcangel and Dragan Espenschied during Gallery Weekend Berlin at the Michel Majerus Estate. It was followed by a new iteration of Arcangel’s performance The AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound (2015 – ongoing), performed by Lena Willikens. The performance took place in September 2024 during Berlin Art week at silent green, Berlin. On May 3, 2025, the program ends with a live performance where Cory Arcangel will activate Majerus’ laptop through the emulation, before a conversation with curator Nadim Samman.
Let’s Play Majerus G3 was created in cooperation with Rhizome, an artist-founded platform for presenting, researching, and preserving digital art. The emulation of Majerus’ computer, developed by OpenSLX, was overseen by Dragan Espenschied (Preservation Director at Rhizome) and Mona Ulrich. The project is supported by grants from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), from the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) at the Zurich University of the Arts, and from Arcangel Surfware, a software and merchandise publisher founded by Arcangel in 2014.
Cory Arcangel (b. 1978, Buffalo, US) is an artist living and working in Stavanger, Norway. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2022); Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland (2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011); The Barbican, London (2011); Hamburger Bahnhof — Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2010) and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2005).
Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship and digital art conservation. Founded in 1996 by artist Mark Tribe as an email discussion list including some of the first artists to work online, Rhizome has played an integral role in the history of contemporary art engaged with digital technologies and the internet. Since 2003, Rhizome has been an affiliate in residence at the New Museum in New York City.
Extended Press Release: English | German
For further information please contact the Michel Majerus Estate:
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Michel Majerus 2022 – Catalog
A comprehensive publication is now available to accompany the Germany-wide exhibition series Michel Majerus 2022, which was dedicated to various phases and aspects of Michel Majerus’ (1967 – 2002) extraordinary oeuvre twenty years after his death.
The exhibition series featured five solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Michel Majerus Estate, and at neugerriemschneider in Berlin, offering new insights into Michel Majerus’ early work as well as the medial and topical questions posed throughout his body of work. Parallel to these exhibitions in Berlin and Hamburg, thirteen museums throughout Germany showed works by Michel Majerus from their collections.
Check out michelmajerus2022.com for further information.