Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present discodisco, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with Frankfurt born and Brooklyn based artist Marin Majić. Expanding upon the visual and conceptual language as shown in his 2023 solo exhibition Nocturnes, discodisco premieres intimately scaled paintings depicting discotheques and primitive landscapes.
The disco era roughly began in 1967 and was most popular from the decade of 1970 through 1980. At nightclubs throughout the world, the youth came together to dance and engage in subculture, in effort to try and escape the time of political upheaval from the Vietnam war. This sentiment of heedlessness and anxiety towards news headlines and daily turmoil, and cataclysmic gravitation toward living in the moment becomes a throughline in the real and sublime narratives within Marin Majić’s work. While the nightclubs and dancefloors in discodisco are more contemporized with CDJs and visual lighting effects, the feeling of enjoyment and pleasure amidst imminent catastrophe as witnessed in the abruptly ended disco era becomes paralleled in Majic’s painted worlds. The dancers, prehistoric individuals, animals, and lobbies shown throughout the exhibition seem to dance on the volcano, ambivalent to the life-changing events yet to transpire, but enthusiastic in each person, being, or setting’s delightful free will in the moment.
To achieve the scratchy yet soft chiaroscuro nature of the works in discodisco, Majić mixes oil color with marble dust, wax, and turpentine, further feeding into the alchemical and surreal scenes he produces. With the marble dust, Majić sculpts away at the surface to create pockets of light, color, and texture. Works like Gravity use this technique both formally and conceptually through the cloisonne-like detailing of each individual pane of the central disco ball, capturing the reality of the object while imposing otherworldly light sources emanating within and beyond its confines.
Majić depicts these notions with dry and bizarre placements of objects and symbols throughout the paintings, typically in doubles or pairs, creating portals in each work that become replicated and expanded upon in others. This rhizomatic logic of time and space becomes apparent through minor details in interiors and settings, like in Burning yearning, where a suited figure, seated in a room with panoramic windows, sips from a brandy glass, looking out in awe at a sunset akin to a hydrogen bomb. The radiant sunglow in Burning yearning becomes microcosmically doubled in the otherworldly Soft in the middle, wherein a monkey guardedly hugs his baby in a cavernous modern box like structure, gazing not at the glaring dawn behind him, but at the remnants of martinis with lemon twists ahead. In both works, the slyly inserted objects in the former work, which normally signify extravagance, life, and celebration lean more towards their opposites in the latter work.
Majić’s oeuvre has leaned towards a sensibility akin to Romantic painters such as JMW Turner and John Martin, whose works showcased a heightened sense of the dramatic and cataclysmic through the grandiosity of the depicted landscape and through microcosmic nods towards faith and humanity. Their influence also brings forth an element of contemporary spiritual experience throughout discodisco. The shimmering light atop a spiral staircase to the heavens in the empty and ominous waiting room of Purgatory appears to be a portal to the heavens. Dancers and skeletons in works like Hiding not running, Moving me moving you, and Tree falling raise their hands in a collective euphoria, praising the DJ and the shared experience of ecstasy. Disconnected in time and space, the works in discodisco present a quiet yet immanent threat to the end of the world, while trying to cope, rejoice, and find solace amidst our collective experience.
Marin Majić (b. 1979, Frankfurt, DE; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, US) studied at the Academy of Visual Arts, Zagreb, Croatia. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Center of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver; Megan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angeles; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles and New York; Galerie Isa, Mumbai; Marc Straus Gallery, New York; and ARNDT Fine Art, Berlin. Majić’s paintings have also been included in group exhibitions organized by Grimm Gallery, New York; Harper’s Books, New York; 1969 Gallery, New York; Huxley Parlour, London; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; Althius Hofland Fine Arts, The Netherlands; Vin Vin Gallery, Vienna; Fortnight Institute, New York; the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville; and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY. His work is held in the public collections of the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville; and the X Museum, Beijing.