For Art Brussels 2022, Nino Mier Gallery presents Promises Made, a series of new paintings by German-born and Brooklyn-based artist Marin Majic. Majic’s small-scale paintings form a reconstructed jungle depicted in dreamlike, rarefied light. Each painting in this new suite of work portrays an unusual vignette from one continuous atmosphere filled with palm fronds, billowing clouds, golden light, and tranquil voyagers.
Within the darkly diaphanous leaves of Majic’s verdant environments, figures appear in a series of entanglements. At times, they find themselves in each other’s grips, as in Space for one, or otherwise in the large palm of the natural world, as in Drifter. What unites these figures is their distance from us. They are often portrayed with eyes closed, or with heads turned away from the viewer. Moreover, they are rendered in a highly shadowed, textured manner that makes their forms blend in with the environment surrounding them.
Majic’s color palette, produced with marble dust, oil, wax, and turpentine, is dominated by the various shades between green and grey. He employs colored pencils to add color and texture to his canvases, which have a heavily worked, grooved surface. To accentuate focal points within the compositions, Majic employs the warm, bright hues of firelight and the cool blues of water. Parts of each landscape – trees, water, grass– are represented with a fluidity that recalls the visual imprecision of distant memory or dreams. Overall, the mediating hand of the artist is strong, producing an uncanny Romanticism that emphasizes the impermanence of human life and the distortions produced by representation.
Marin Majic (b. 1979 in Frankfurt, DE; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) studied at the Academy of Visual Arts, Zagreb, Croatia. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Isa, Mumbai; Marc Straus Gallery, New York; and ARNDT Fine Art, Berlin. Majic’s paintings have also been included in group exhibitions organized by Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; the Knoxville Museum of Art; and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY.