Curated by Anne Prenzler

Also on view at Deichtorhallen Hamburg from November 18, 2005–January 29, 2006

The chief irony attending Michel Majerus’s tragic death in a plane crash at age thirty-five in 2002 is that his art—eyeball-strafing post-Pop paintings and installations colliding high and low imagery—could have gone on hacking through the mutating forest of signs forever. In Majerus’s view, progress was over and everything in our image-riddled culture was equivalent. These exhibitions—key components in an ongoing retrospective that, by 2007, will have spanned five separate institutions—should be appropriately overwhelming. Hannover gets the paintings and Hamburg the installations, giving the headroom never achieved in his lifetime to Majerus’s trick of flipping iconographic repletion into end-of-history emptiness.

— Martin Herbert