Michel Majerus

Michel Majerus (1967 – 2002) was a Luxembourgish artist whose work combined painting with digital media. He lived and worked in Berlin until his death in an accident in November 2002.His work was featured in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Europe and North America, most notably the "Pop Reloaded" exhibition in Los Angeles.
Majerus was born in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg in 1967. In 1986, Majerus began to study at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, graduating in 1992.

 Painting was Majerus’s preferred medium of expression, but his creative horizon extended to many aspects of popular culture, from computer games, digital imagery, film, television, and pop music to trademarks and corporate logos. His paintings' stylistic quotations include excerpts from Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Jean-Michel Basquiat, video games and other pop-culture sources. He did not limit himself to two-dimensional surfaces, but created dynamic, painted installations which surround the viewer.In if you are dead, so it is (2000), Majerus covered the interior surface of a skateboarders' half-pipe.

 After moving to Los Angeles in 2000 through the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), an academic exchange, Majerus began work on a series of thirty large-format paintings incorporating digital media and animated videos. Completed in Berlin the following year, the series eventually comprised over thirty works.Nine of these works would eventually become the "Pop Reloaded" exhibition in Los Angeles. "Pop Reloaded" emphasised the visual confusion of urban landscapes and the scale and domination imposed by freeway billboards and office towers. It drew on works by Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter in inscribing logos and detail on the dull greys and blacks of a cityscape. The paintings were accompanied by a video of a constantly changing image of Majerus' signature, to illustrate the idea of celebrity as a constantly changing concept.
Majerus was working on an exhibition entitled "Project Space" for Tate Liverpool when he died..In November 2002, Majerus was killed in a plane crash while travelling from Berlin to Luxembourg.Wikipedia