Immersive 118-ft Wall Painting by Markus Linnenbrink Transforms Lobby of PAFA's Hamilton Building
Immersive 118-ft Wall Painting by Markus Linnenbrink
Transforms Lobby of PAFA’s Hamilton Building
Installation in progress June 16–25, 2014
PHILADELPHIA (June 13, 2014) — The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is pleased to announce a new, permanent installation by artist Markus Linnenbrink. From June 16-25, Linnenbrink will be on-site to create a vibrant, horizontally-striped 118-foot wall painting that will transform the curved wall in the lobby of PAFA’s Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building (128 N. Broad Street).
The site-specific installation, titled THERIDENEVERENDS, will reach from the welcome desk to the inside of PAFA’s Museum Store, Portfolio. Three PAFA students will assist Markus Linnenbrink in creating this immersive installation: Nadine Beauharnois (MFA ’15), Matt Chapman (MFA ’15), and Caitlin Clements (MFA ’14).
“Linnenbrink’s wall painting will be a beacon on Broad Street, making clear to passersby that this is a place for art, and dazzling visitors as they enter the Hamilton Building. By working with PAFA students, Linnenbrink is bringing to the fore our commitment to both established and emerging artists as they create work of the highest order,” says Harry Philbrick, the Edna S. Tuttleman Director of the Museum.
“THERIDENEVERENDS was a cardboard sign I read on a shopping card containing some personal belongings as I was walking from the 2/3 train at New York's Penn Station to my Amtrak train to meet with Harry Philbrick at PAFA to discuss the wall painting on-site for the first time. The sign stuck with me as it applies to a lot of different aspects of our lives. Reading it on my way to Philadelphia I decided to make it the title of my work at PAFA,” says Linnenbrink. “This work will be visible not only to Museum visitors, but to everyone on the street, even to people that just pass by without ever making it inside the building -- everybody riding their own personal ride that never ends, until it does. In this we are all together. While I do have a certain idea and concept for the painting, the real creation happens right there on site, making the work a piece that can only come to life in this very spot and moment. Creating a wall size painting in situ is always exciting, and I look forward to working with everybody at PAFA.”
Linnenbrink creates colorful, layered works of abstraction, experimenting with materials like pigment, wood, and resin. Of his work, Linnenbrink has said: “I try to create a space in which perception is experienced and in which it is possible to reflect on perception. An ultimately never-ending process is thus set in motion, and an essentially vital one. Invigorating this process in a very sensuous way is for me an incentive and motivation to preoccupy myself to such an extent with color. I’m interested in the viewer’s joyful encounter with himself.”
In his site-specific wall paintings, Linnenbrink layers acrylic and pigment in energetic stripes, embracing the natural viscosity of the materials and allowing the lines to drip and run into each other. His installations utilize the angles and dimensions of each space to create distinctive environments.
Of Linnenbrink’s wall paintings, critic Dominique Nahas has said: “The work is simultaneously luminous, pulsating, and modulated. As we move along with its intensity, we are allowed, equally, to drift with it as well, carried along by its insistent lateral flows and downward drips. His gestural work of parallel bars asks us to consider the narrative implications of the works own making: its beginning, middle, and end and the layered and interstitial points that lie in between…The result is performative artwork that moves us emotionally.”
Born in Germany in 1961, Linnenbrink studied at the Gesamthochschule, Kassel, Germany, and at the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin. He has exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia, and has been creating wall paintings since 2002 that have transformed museum, gallery, and private spaces, including the Hammer Museum; Pulse Art Fair; and Ameringer McEnery Yohe Gallery. His work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA; Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, NH; Museum Neue Galerie, Germany; Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel; among others. Linnenbrink lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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