Since 1988 Markus WOW 123 Genesius is an active part of the international graffiti scene. With his very own style he painted loads of walls in many cities all over the world and put his name on the map pretty fast. With artists like DAIM, Daniel Man, Atom, Kent und Flying Förtress he can be count as one leading figure of the second graffiti generation in Germany. Against the predominant rules of the graffiti movement in the early 90’s, WOW123 didn’t just experimented with typography – he early mixed classical stylewriting with photorealistic themes. Not the entire scene was amused by that, but the artist didn’t care and because of that Markus Genesius can truly be seen as an inspiration for many writers until today. He created his own graffiti language and shaped a whole new style era within this young art movement.
Always searching for new artistic ways, he finally found himself working within the mystical walls of an artist’s studio. 2010 Genesius settled down in an artist community in his hometown Bremen and experiments with new materials and artistic procedures since then. He was eager to not just copy his urban vocabulary onto canvases – this wouldn’t feel right, so the artists opinion. During his latest creative times, he worked with one symbol, which soon became his signature motive: the german TV test picture, which was used until the beginning of the 90’s for send pauses during the nights. It is one of the most famous colour test pictures worldwide and Markus Genesius took control over this abstract composition of lines and colour fields. He divides the elements, edits them in a sensitive, sometimes brutal way and brings them back together in new arrangements. The symbolic language of graffiti and the artistic use of spray-paint won’t be ignored in this process, whereby Genesius always comes back to his urban background. Thereby he works with overlapping surfaces – one function which goes beyond stylewriting on walls or painting on canvases. For his last overwhelming solo exhibition „Inner Conflict“in Bremen January 2016, he produced a large wood sculpture which takes the test picture into the three-dimensional room.
Homepage: https://markus-genesius.com/
