20th Century Debris

This catalog showcases Marc Brandenburg's negative-reversed, monochrome drawings, which capture the ills and excesses of modern society.Marc Brandenburg has won international acclaim as an outstanding graphic artist. His defining genre is pencil drawings after photographic sources, whose tonality he inverts as in photographic negatives. Brandenburg captures his sources as he travels the world or samples them from magazines, films, and books. His freehand translation of the inverted and distorted originals yields haunting and pensive renditions of the contemporary world. Brandenburg's motifs originate from urban everyday life: protest marches, unhoused people, snippets of subculture, and portraits of celebrities that have become symbols of pop culture. His drawings grapple with society's ills as well as the extravagance and consumerism that are concomitants of late capitalism.Released on the occasion of Brandenburg's comprehensive retrospective at Berlinische Galerie, this publication gathers around one hundred and fifty works, including recent drawings and rarely shown works from the 1990s as well as photographs and videos. With writings by Ilka Voermann, Thomas Love, Lynette Roth, and Franziska Ziegler.