MIXED MEDIA & MODERN AMERICANA

Marcus Leiste has a fine sense for the distortions in American art history. The series Yes, We’re Open thrives off of the meeting of photography and graphic design and painting. The works walk the fine line between these arts and pose questions that Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) opened up. Rauschenberg, perhaps one of the most diverse and productive artists of the postwar era, properly shook up the concept of image as he combined real objects of everyday American life on canvas with painting, only shortly thereafter to begin implementing the raw materials of pictures from the news, product images, and his own photography to create complex, multi-layered prints. Today this are considered artistic documents of American history. Developed out of these “picture storms” and the efforts of other great artists such as Andy Warhol, American Pop Art still influences the scene today in its focuses on life and its everyday appearance, non-judgmentally and in never-before-seen intensity.

Markus Leiste likes to live in other cultures. California was long his home, with which he dealt intensely on paper as well as in spirit. Leiste’s use of an instant transfer process, in which he intervenes with painterly gestures, consistently follows the basic principles of dealing creatively with technical processes. He looks to expand upon the given – and to question it. Leiste’s extensive studies of art history and literature, as well as his writings, are evident here.

Leiste’s photo painting also conveys the principles of Pop Art:
With this series, I look at the language and imagery of advertisement. In order for a product to stand out, the makers of this product have to give it a special appearance or create an attractive ‘image’ around it. This, in turn, substantially increases the odds that the product in question will catch our attention. And it is only a tiny step from there to the desire to own that product...

Here we also find the explanation for Pop Art’s historical and current works’ – products’ – unceasing attractiveness. Logos, fonts, everyday objects, and especially the American cultural sphere are transformed and upgraded through the mechanisms of artistic production. They appear to be almost erotic and mythically charged.

Horst Kloever