Magnus Plessen

Magnus Plessen’s paintings fascinate by means of their autonomous compositional techniques as well as their reduced pictorial vocabulary. They are increasingly arousing the attention of the international art scene.

Plessen worked for many years as a photographer and filmmaker before he started to sound out painting and its multifaceted potentials in 2000. After examining the relationship between photography and painting for several years, the guiding principle of the painterly approach has changed considerably over the past years: the photographic model based on a not always coherent perception of the things now not only determines the composition as a whole, but Plessen now increasingly questions the modes of representing the being which have remained with painting.

Although he still applies certain self-limiting procedures – he thus for example works with strips of tape with whose help he transfers the contours of the objective world to the canvas – the painting now seems freer on the whole, whereby he simultaneously succeeds in mirroring the disparate elements of our experience of reality to the canvas’ painted skin.