Marcus Frimel
My artistic work is made up of performative and narrative elements.
I am interested in the exchange and friction with people in collaborations.
I want to better understand and develop myself as a person and artist. I believe this requires other people. I want to get away from the studio. I am interested in real places, be they social or private.
I am looking for ways to enter them.
How can I understand and shape the world if I only live in a closed bubble.
I think about means that enable me to leave familiar spaces.
One that I already actively use is social media. Here I interact with several fictional characters within our collective.
But what role enables me to enter other structures and to be taken seriously as an artist in these social relationships?
These are the questions that concern me the most.
2008 - 2009 Studies - Design - FH Lübeck
2009 Apprenticeship wood sculptor
Self-employed since 2012
2015 - 2021 AdBK Nuremberg, class Jochen Flinzer - master student - fine arts
2017 - 2021 Karlsruhe Art Academy, class of John Bock - master student - free sculpture
2019 - 2020 AdbK Vienna, class Anna Viebrock - stage design
2020 - Foundation and management of the collective "Das Nest"
2022 - Graduate award - AdBK Nuremberg
2023 - Wolfram von Eschenbach Cultural Promotion Prize
2018 Broken Hearts Devour - in Cannibals With Feelings - Kunstarkaden Munich
2018 Milk foam - Vitrine Nuremberg
2018 Rebekka a. - AEG Nuremberg
2019 a yellowhead - super machine - Kunstmühle Mostviel
2019 Isn`t it a gimme? - Class John Bock - HfK Gallery Bremen
2019 The Dinner - AdBK Nuremberg
2020 Network - Semperdepot
2020 The Blue Dress - Cross-disciplinary video project Leonardo - Center for Creativity and Innovation
2020 Collective - The Nest
March 2021 - Diploma exhibitions (without public)
October 2021 Master student exhibition - Society of Friends of Young Art - Baden Baden
January 2022 Graduate exhibition - AdBK Nuremberg - Graduate Award
2023 January Group exhibition - Soft Hearted - Kunstraum Bethanien - Berlin
2023 February Group exhibition - GISELA - Freier Kunstraum - Berlin
2023 August-September - Solo exhibition - Falling Eyes - Kunstverein Erlangen
Website: www.marcusfrimel.com
Instagram: marcusfrimel
The Vapors of the City, 4 minutes, 2020
" Obsessively perceiving reality
Julius Jurkiewitsch "Bearing. / We dedicate ourselves to experimentation. / It excavates / our inalienable realities, / in order to rethink them.“1 In his work Dämpfe der Stadt (Vapors of the City) Marcus Frimel interweaves different visual media such as film, sculpture and performance to create a scenery that uses artistic fiction to form an experimental platform for exploring symbolic realities. The extended stage frames an abstract location that is in an acute state of limbo due to the indeterminacy of space and time. The bourgeois objects or props appear just as timeless, in them the simultaneity of the museum and the flea market is omnipresent; decay, dust, family, household, discourse, modernity, myth, pathos. The uniform protagonists, who have grown together with this world, interrogate each other as alter egos of their real-life performers in a dizzyingly deep psychological complexity, with milk bubbling away in a coffee machine as an abject scenic mirror. A metronome spreads nervousness far too prominently, accelerates the heartbeat and - suddenly, as a matter of course - the relationship level of the actors changes and defuses the threateningly skewed hierarchies as a consensual comedy. Tension changes back to relaxation.
Past, present and future dissolve into archetypal actions that exploit a single look or touch to cinematic effect. Again and again, anointing, feeding, bathing, caressing - mostly there is absorbed silence and laborious stillness. In between, isolated words that seem increasingly alien due to their monotonous repetition, until they almost lose their meaning to the point where they threaten to become pure sound again. These rituals dissect human behavior
with clinical precision in neurotically coordinated stage sets that entertain references to cinematic topoi such as the dusty psychiatric institution or media formats such as reality TV. The aesthetic concoction resembles a mysterious melodramatic sitcom group therapy with second-hand softcore charm and infantile-erotic or socially repressed and widely acted out fetish and horror fantasies, which are restaged via the collective play with secretions and ointments in high culture. Of course, this is about catharsis, but even more about the forensic taxonomy of the inherently contradictory human condition - „gods with anuses“, according to cultural theorist Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death.2
„The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.“3 The milky, opaque shimmering tones of Marcus Frimel‘s atmospherically dense productions are reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer‘s Melencolia
I (1514) or Edward Kienholz‘s The State Hospital (1966). Like the rhythm of a metronome, the art has a direct effect on the body and, conversely, contaminates inanimate matter such as material and technical components with the organic. In a finely tuned dramaturgy of individual scores, the sectarian working group gives birth to art and artist as an allegorical utopia that continuously dissolves, changes and manifests itself again. The individual
subject in it is externally determined and possessed, as if it were determined by an organism acting in secret, which grows through the „sticky jam of existence“ like a fungus with the finest hyphae.4 The blurred entity that lies above everything, which is repetitively encircled by different perspectives and ritually invoked in a continuous process of transformation, is the perception of reality itself, which remains completely incomprehensible, while the
constantly repeated attempts to grasp it, the artistic working through of it, the playful pedalling in the self-knitted straitjacket, doomed to failure in eternal approximation, absurd, desperate to comical, traumatically irreconcilable, irresolvable as well as liberating in the attempt, lonely as well as together, again, again and again.
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1The Nest (marcusfrimel.com/the-nest/).
2Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, New York: Simon & Schuster 1997, S. 51.
Ebd. S. 172.
3Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel. Theorie u. Geschichte einer starken Empfindung.
4Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1999. S. 485.
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Camera Max Grünauer, 2020"
The Vapors of the City - Multimediainstallation, video - 4:13, 2022
“Marcus Frimel has discovered his own aesthetic and brought it to an impressive fruition in a multivalent installation with objects and live performance. In his current project, The Nest, on which he has been working since March 2021, he defines the concept of the expanded stage and seeks a collective working community. The purpose of the collective is the development a new utopia, which changes and manifests itself through the characters of this new world. The Process is reversed. It is clear that Marcus Frimel questions existing structures and dissolves them. This free and playful style has the potential to view art and performance in a new way.”
John Bock
His current work, The Nest, is extremely complex. Marcus Frimel is the initiator and the original author of this work. However, he does not consider it to be finished and increasingly would like to turn it into a collective project belonging to
all the participants. Transformation had already played a major role in his sculptural and spatial works. A sculpture may become something different in another context, and indeed, it could even be transformed itself and in Marcus Frimel’s eyes retain its identity. The project The Nest shows transformation not only as a linear process, but as something simultaneous from different perspectives. By dissolving the authorship of the individual, dissolving linearity, and opening up to diverse media, something multifaceted emerges, whose framework is aesthetic appearance. It will be exciting to see how
this work develops in terms of content and changes in its aesthetics through the increasing distribution of authorship. Marcus Frimel’s work is the result of his incredible dedication and commitment. He invests a lot of energy in the extensive research alone. He immerses himself obsessively in his work and pursues it against all odds. The intensity impresses me immensely.”
Jochen Flinzer
Camera Documentation Lukas Pürmayr, 2022
Camera Videos Max Grünauer, 2020"
Ennie, 120x60cm, photographie, 2020
"Camera Max Grünauer"
The Dinner, Video - 7:47 minutes, 2019
"Camera: Mathis Hauter "