MARKUS LINNENBRINK | ES BALUARD MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE PALMA AND CASAL SOLLERIC
WHATWETHINKASINSIGNIFICANTPROVIDESTHEPURESTAIRWE BREATHE
30 April - 7 September 2025
Cortesia Casal Solleric. © Juan David Cortes.
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.
"WHATWETHINKASINSIGNIFICANTPROVIDESTHEPURESTAIRWEBREATHE" is on view from 30 April to 7 September 2025 at Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma and Casal Solleric, Palma, Spain.
Cortesia Casal Solleric. © Juan David Cortes.
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.
Cortesia Casal Solleric. © Juan David Cortes.
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, “WHATWETHINKASINSIGNIFICANT-PROVIDESTHEPURESTAIRWEBREATHE” [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.