Magnus Plessen’s paintings occupy a fluid threshold between abstraction and representation. His practice is defined by a sustained inquiry into perception, structure, material, and transience, resulting in works that investigate the conditions of seeing and the instability of form. Across his oeuvre, Plessen engages a diverse range of painterly strategies, bringing together additive and subtractive processes to construct images that register both presence and erasure.
The distinctive character of Plessen’s work emerges through a systematic development of the picture plane. Paint is applied and subsequently removed, revealing passages of compact form set against areas of pronounced negative space. Resolute brushstrokes, scrapes, and exposed layers keep the physical making of the painting visible, so that process and image remain inseparable. The resulting compositions articulate a rigorous, syncopated rhythm, in which forms appear to coalesce and disperse in equal measure.
Plessen’s approach is fundamentally phenomenological. Rather than pursuing mimetic description, he seeks to articulate the immediacy of perception and the fleeting nature of emotional experience. Figures and motifs slip in and out of focus, poised between stasis and movement. Grounds are often dissolved or withheld, leaving atmospheric traces akin to retinal after-images. In this way, the works emphasize the contingency of vision and the instability of representation, situating the viewer within a constantly shifting perceptual field.
Magnus Plessen was born in 1967 in Hamburg . His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts (2014); the Art Institute of Chicago (2005); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2002); and MoMA PS1, New York (2002). He has participated in significant international group exhibitions, among them Museu Serralves, Porto (2007); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2006); and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Plessen has been represented by Konrad Fischer Galerie since 2004.
Plessen lives and works in Berlin.