Markus Linnenbrink. WHATWETHINKASINSIGNIFICANT- PROVIDESTHEPURESTAIRWEBREATHE

Visiting an installation by Markus Linnenbrink involves an exercise in perception of the very processes of memory. As viewers, moving through intervened spaces implies putting our attention on practice, requiring us to actively listen, a fundamental tool in deciphering the layered memories that emerge between our bodies and our surroundings. Through this evocative relationship, we begin to grasp the totality of the space we find ourselves in, initiating the decoding of this marvellous experience Linnenbrink provides us.

For the first time, Es Baluard Museu and Casal Solleric join together in a coproduction that presents a series of site-specific, pictorial installations by this German artist. The interventions will occupy spaces of both institutions that are not strictly for exhibitions, enlivening a dialogue between architecture, painting and perception. Linnenbrink’s work is inspired by the ongoing exploration of space as experience, finding in painting the ideal medium for transcending the physical limitations of his environment.

His installations expand beyond their sites, inhabiting them and encompassing as their own the space around them. His work, which is closely bound to colour, requires the viewer to intuitively recognise the artist’s trademark gesture: dripping, an accumulation of pigments that create dynamic surfaces flowing with vibrant, wild chromatism, sedimenting and filtering into the site’s own cracks, leaving marks where memory arises, in the intersection between matter and absence.

In his practice, Linnenbrink understands the void as a fundamental presence rather than a deficit. His installations call for the air we breathe to be inhabited, to perceive the essence of what is apparently insignificant, there where the deepest truth will frequently reside. The project’s title, “WHATWETHINKASINSIGNIFICANTPROVIDESTHEPURESTAIRWEBREATHE” [What We Think As Insignificant Provides the Purest Air We Breathe], taken from Stevie Wonder’s song The Secret Life of Plants, emboldens this idea.

With his proposals, Linnenbrink calls on visitors to Es Baluard Museu and Casal Solleric to rescale the way we set up in front of/in/inside a work, a sensorial path that accentuates his affinity for becoming and transience.

In his pieces, colour, size and immersion are vehicles for memory, perception and emotion. They invite us to reconsider the essence of what surrounds us, transforming the act of looking and reminding us, through just a drop of paint or in the imperceptible transparency of air, how conscious experience provides meaning and substance.

Markus Linnenbrink (Dortmund, 1961) studied at the Gesamthochschule Kassel and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (graduating in 1985 and 1988).

His work has been shown in international exhibitions, most notably in solo shows at Miles McEnery, New York (2025, 2023, 2021); Taubert Contemporary, Berlin (2020, 2017, 2015); Max Estrella, Madrid (2019, 2015); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2014). His group exhibitions include those held at the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul (2019); the University of Strasbourg (2018); the San José Museum of Art (2012); the Kunstmuseum Bochum in Germany (2010); and the Beijing Biennale (2010).

His work is in public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the San José Museum of Art, California; the Hammer Museum at UCLA; Los Angeles; the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya; the Dutch Ministry of Culture in The Hague; the Senate of Germany, Berlin; the Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Neue Galerie, Kassel; and the Wellesley College, Massachusetts, amongst others.