Marc Brandenburg’s first UK exhibition, Snowflake will present a series of new drawings that explore the conditions of life at the fringes of society. Referencing Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club in the exhibition’s title, Brandenburg addresses attributes that are increasingly the object of censure and ridicule in contemporary society: sensitivity, vulnerability, trauma, a lack of stamina, and the understanding of uniqueness as innate to all individuals. Larger-than-life scenes from a protest march are presented alongside smaller images of faceless figures – masked, heads bowed, or fully covered – severed from their surroundings and appearing cocooned or in free-fall amidst an expanse of undefined space.
With an oeuvre that encompasses drawing, photography, performance and installation, Brandenburg’s unique pencil drawings and his innovative modes of immersive display form a distinctive and acclaimed element of his practice. Experienced in an immersive black-lit room, the exhibition offers a totalising experience, alluding to the photographic methods that inform Brandenburg’s production as well as to the severing from social rhetoric that occurs as a result of these processes and in the real, lived experiences of many of his subjects. Lit by an unearthly UV glow amidst the darkness, the drawings appear as abstract stills drawn from a film. Inverting light and dark values, the resultant images radically expand the possibilities of drawing and function as springboards into bizarre parallel world(s), reduced to their fundamentals and freed from explicit social or political narrative.
| Duration | 06 February 2020 - 04 April 2020 |
| Times | Tuesday–Saturday: 10am–6pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac |
| Address | Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NJ |
| Contact | 4402038138400 / polly.gaer@ropac.net / www.ropac.net |