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About Dirk

LOVE IS THE ULTIMATE POWER.
THE QUESTION MARK (?) IS THE GREATEST SYMBOL.
USE BOTH ALL THE TIME AND YOU WILL FINALLY BE.

DON’T BE AGENTIC. ALWAYS QUESTION AUTHORITY. NEVER OBEY ANYONE (unless they hold a gun to your head). ALWAYS THINK AND REASON.

BIO:

Dirk Marwig (German; 30 May 1960) is a German multifaceted artist (painter, creator and maker of “Objects” and Constructions, designer and crafter of furniture and jewelry; an autodidactic ”Jack of all Trades and the Master of Many”) born in Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
Dirk Marwig represents the ‘complete’ artist, a modern renaissance man, his art being a lesson in lysergic geometry, a continuous, a subtle yet energetic ‘back and forth’ between Reason and Unreason, always sublimely surprising, entertaining and dazzling the spectator, always questioning the Status Quo. Dirk Marwig art differs from most of his contemporaries in that he does not rely on a single, specific, easy to recognize and repetitive “Formula” or “Recipe” to express his ideas. Repetition is not part of his repertoire. He works by himself in order to keep the ‘result’ a pure work of his. Risk, the search for novelty and the challenge that comes with it, in combination with gutsy trust in his own basic instincts form part of his process. To confuse and to surprise himself and therefore his audience is how Dirk Marwig achieves and maintains a high level of freshness and childlike innocence in his work. His art is therefore in a constant state of evolution.
Coming in contact with his work, characteristics such as the unusual technique, the handcrafted perfection, the attention to detail, texture and composition, the format, the humor or the tragedy, the hidden mathematics and creative geometry with exquisite use of color combined with an eternal humanistic “Theme”, astound and baffle the spectator.

DETAILS:

  • Born 1960 in Bochum,Germany
  • 1966-1972 lives with parents in New York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Rapid City, South Dakota, U.S.A.
  • 1972-1981 basic schooling in Frankfurt, Germany
  • 1981-1990 lives, studies and works in New York City
  • 1981-1984 studies Art at Art Students League, (meets Andy Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat…)
  • 1987 works with Marc Jacobs (creates shoes and plastic jewelry for Marc Jacobs’ first successful show-Spring 1988) -his Rings appear on the cover of Vogue (October1987) other creations are featured in French and British Vogue…,he sells at Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys New York also at various stores in Paris and London.
  • 1988 creates the U-CREATE…a “do it yourself T-shirt” kit. It sells (among other stores) at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, both in N.Y.C., the Chicago Museum of Modern Art ,the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art gift shops and at F.A.O.SCHWARTZ,N.Y.C.
  • 1990-2006 lives and works in MADRID, SPAIN
  • 2006-PRESENT DIRK MARWIG lives and works in West Vancouver,B.C.,Canada

One man shows:

  • 1993 Bennassar Gallery,Madrid,Spain
  • 1994 Nikolaus Fischer Gallery,Frankfurt,Germany
  • 1996 Nikolaus Fischer Gallery,Frankfurt,Germany
  • 1998 Nikolaus Fischer Gallery,Frankfurt,Germany
  • 1999 Goethe Institute,Madrid,Spain
  • 2001 Nikolaus Fischer Gallery,Frankfurt,Germany
  • 2003 Nikolaus Fischer Gallery,Frankfurt,Germany
  • 2008 Nikolaus Fischer Gallery,Frankfurt,Germany

Collections:

  • Deutsche Bank für Gemeinwirtschaft
  • Crédit Suisse
  • Opera Frankfurt

94 of Dirk Marwig’s pieces(paintings,drawings and objects-large and small) are not documented here on this site because documentation is not available(the photos and descriptions have been lost during the course Dirk Marwig’s turbulant life).The missing pieces are ALL signed “DIRKMARWIG” on the back or on the bottom(never on the front,in order not to destroy the composition)

  • The photos of ALL of Dirk Marwig’s works are TRUE to the “physical appearence”,i.e.: NOTHING IS ‘PHOTO-SHOPPED’-Everything really exists the way it is shown.
  • All images are also ‘color-true’ to the original works.
  • Downloads of images are for PERSONAL USE ONLY.

New Articles:

DIRK MARWIG ‘La Dimension Incipiente’Article by Antonio Gregori Arnaiz for OTRBurgos(Spain) May 10th 2013

DIRK MARWIG ‘The Incipient Dimension’-Translation into english:
Looking at a work of art by Dirk Marwig is an exercise in lysergic geometry, a strange Freudian experience which recovers the more embryonic area of the mind, taking one back, for a moment, to the remote safety zone of the amniotic environment. In this realm of reptilian inspiration, space and time, along with consciousness lose meaning due to overstepping this natural ‘boundary’ where a whole new set of ‘laws’ are at play: the ‘Cartesian interpretation axis’ is released and positive contemplation moves towards pure reason and formal synthesis: to face Dirk Marwig’s work is a continuous exercise of reason and unreason; a recurring process that nests thesis and antithesis in the simplicity of a stroke rigorously accurate, but also true.

The universe of this German, inhabitant of the world, cannot escape the known forms, his own origins and the possible environments which fitted him out as a lucid interpreter of the vital essence, as circular as Hegel’s dialectic itself. Infiltrating the cosmos, Marwig participates in it’s ‘spaces’ and ‘times’ deconstructing structures, revising geometric axioms or being born again out of his own Renaissence, as an installed ‘Vitruvian Man’ mocking Leonardo.

This is the signature of a complete artist, the author who lets himself be seduced by the evocative capacity of the abstraction without renouncing the convenience and practicality of form; of the creator who only plans on those concepts to capture their true self and origin; the Rhenish genius who chooses a drawing pen figuration to escape the topics of the ‘German’; the artisan; bastard of the fifteenth century who sketches delirious coordinates with the paint of his dreams. Thus the essence of an everyday object, lifeless by definition, takes it’s abstract form-even taken to the most informal or impossible appearance- to end up being what it is: a work of art which is sincere, human, proud.
And of the conclusive work, be it an ‘oil on wood’, a piece of ‘Arte Povera’ or a majestic ‘pop’ inspired piece of furniture, rises a new fractal universe of longing, a singularity which feeds off the environment and grows by the multifaceted virtue of Dirk Marwig. That’s when the magic occurs, and that fascinating Freudian regression seizes the observer, troubling and baffling him, leaving him defenseless against the solace enchantment of the conjunction of his work. The joy of contemplation converts itself into drunkenness when all is accompanied by their allies, of the furniture that Marwig designs, of the music he choses and mixes, perhaps of his own brilliance.
Behind all this, of course, lies the temptation of names, current relevance and the human weakness of comparison; a useless question because all are in Dirk Marwig. Kandinsky, Miro, Bacon, Warhol, Mondrian and even Phillipe Starck are part of his universe, but they will only be references, which assume and betray all creative talent. They are the pillars of their formation and the dynamic of their times, their parallel universes. And the work of Marwig feels and ‘is’ understood without any other context other than that of it’s own, without more information than his own name and no more pretension than pure artistic joy.
The work of Marwig is unique, modern and sublime. Unmitigated.

STATEMENT:

My work originates in the subconscious; an idea for a piece comes to me in a fraction of a second. I then browse through my studio looking for a way to express this idea with all the possible means (materials) I have at hand at that moment.
I distill the possibilities, calculating what is possible and what is not. If nothing appears to be ‘possible’ I begin to experiment anyway with the first probable option that first came to my mind when the ‘idea’ appeared. I try out various ways to physically ‘bring to life’ this idea. “Just Doing” is part of my process and by “Doing” the idea turns into something much bigger and something much more interesting then I ever could have imagined in the beginning.

Dirk Marwig May 13th 2013