Marc Brandenburg

Marc Brandenburg helped shape the subculture of West Berlin. He came into contact with the local punk scene as far back as the late 1970s, acted in underground films, worked as a bouncer in the Dschungel, a legendary West Berlin club in the 1980s, and is a self-taught fashion designer. To this day, fashion is part of his artistic work, which centres on drawing.

Brandenburg's starting point is usually photographs he has taken himself, which he sketches and combines with other motifs. Since the mid-1990s, he has experimented with copies and image editing programmes, which he uses to invert and distort his drawings into negatives, which he then retraces. Often the motif is cut out and mounted on the empty image background, so that it seems to float in space – as in the large-format etching presented here.

The inversion of black and white is repeatedly understood as a subversive commentary on his skin colour and on racism in Germany, as Brandenburg has said in an interview. According to the artist, at most his art is political only in the sense that "everything I reproduce in my drawings is filtered through the view of a person to whom society has assigned the role of an outsider." In addition to staged self-portraits with various masks, Brandenburg's work focuses on roles and body images, costumes, and rituals that fall outside the social norm.

Marc Brandenburg (born 1965 in Berlin) lives and works in Berlin.