Approaching the SLS Brickell Hotel & Residences in Miami, passersby are greeted by a large-scale installation of painted stripes. That’s all thanks to artist Markus Linnenbrink, who reimagined an otherwise ordinary concrete façade into a vivid canvas that showcases one of his signature drip paintings in large scale.
Wrapping the building, the bright mural (painted from top to bottom over one summer) adds a jolt of energy to downtown and paves the way to Philippe Starck’s sumptuous interiors. “I loved that scale and scope,” says Linnenbrink of the project he completed in 2016. To cover a space of that size, Linnenbrink developed a technique that enabled him and his assistant to paint a larger area fresco style in one setting, covering up to 12 stories.
The colorful exterior certainly inspires awe, but for anyone familiar with the German-born, Brooklyn, New York-based Linnenbrink, it is merely a super-sized extension of his oeuvre. Like the American Color Field painters Morris Louis and Gene Davis, Linnenbrink is known for his drippy, vertical stripe paintings. By mixing pigments with epoxy resin, he says his process is centered on “setting a movement into motion, then stepping back.”
His multifaceted repertoire also includes layered resin paintings that he cuts with drills and hand routers, sculptures created with the run-off from his paintings accumulated over years in his studio, and public installations like HEARYOURNAMELIKELIGHTPASSINGBY, which graces the concourse level of 75 Rockefeller Plaza in New York. Such massive creations, he hopes, leaves viewers with the “overwhelming experience of a room totally transformed.”
Elements of surprise and spontaneity are essential to Linnenbrink’s work, but “that happens in the eye and soul of the viewer. They can wander as far as they wish,” he says. “Color is the way we understand the world.”
The colorful exterior of the SLS Brickell Hotel & Residences in Miami, designed by Philippe Starck
