The work of Luxembourgian artist Michel Majerus combines painting with digital media. Inspired by popular culture, such as computer games, digital imagery, film, TV, pop music or corporate logos, and bringing these together with canonized styles, such as minimalism, gestural abstraction or Pop art. Majerus's work confronts the experience of virtual and of emotional space with the real spectator's experience, making his works much ahead of their time.

MoM Block 36 and 38 is part of an extensive - and due to the artist's untimely death in 2002 - un-concluded series, initiated in 1996, comprising of over 170 canvases. MoM is an abbreviation of Modezentrum Mitte, a former fashion factory in Mitte, East Berlin, in which Majerus had his first Berlin studio. The series introduces a methodology of acrylic paint on canvas, painted in two sizes only. Majerus's approach to the analysis of painting's history is a helpful key to understanding his method. Even though Majerus never knew the internet and today's digital age as we know it today, he appears to have anticipated its ability to flatten the specific time, weight, or meaning of an image. Combining various approaches to painting, which bring together the cheerful colours of Pop Art and advertising with uniform colour fields characteristic for minimalism, Majerus introduces himself as a postmodern painter, whose technique is based on an appropriation of styles, which observe the past through the prism of the present, shifting the viewer's perception of the image and our understanding of the painterly medium at large.



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