Caochangdi | Platform China
Berlin-based painter Markus Willeke’s works are steeped in the tropes of horror films and heavy metal pop culture. Boarded-up doors and signs warning viewers to “Keep Out” hang on the canvas as menacingly as the intricately detailed Megadeth and Iron Maiden tattoos Willeke also depicts. The artist's current exhibition at Platform China, “One Step Further to the Edge,” displays a range of these works, providing Beijing a chance to peer in at one of Germany’s most cutting-edge painters. Willeke works with watercolor on paper and acrylic on canvas, diluting his acrylics and painting on wet canvases so that both media contain flowing, dripping brush strokes, well suited to the gory nature of Willeke's obsessions. In a painting of an Iron Maiden tattoo, it is unclear if the drips oozing from a skeleton’s axe are blood rendered in the original tattoo or accidental drips from Willeke’s own brush. In all his works at the Platform China exhibition, Willeke portrays the flatness of his subject’s surface–whether it be a television screen, a door or human flesh–to create a trompe l'oueil effect, drawing attention to the two-dimensional nature of his medium, as well as the gaze of both spectator and artist. Ultimately, this intra-diegetic effect intensifies the hall-of-mirrors, horror-show sense of unease Willeke revels in.

Markus Willeke’s solo exhibition, “One Step Further to the Edge,” shows at Platform China (Caochangdi) through January 31.

–Blake Stone-Banks