Frank Maier - Joy, Happiness and Pleasure ...

About

Frank Maier explores the possibilities and limitations of pictorial languages with subjective vocabularies. His paintings are rich in information yet disclose nothing at first glance. They are diagrams of personal experience, distilled and channeled into a subjective visual language, which is highly engaging in its density but concurrently leaves ample space for free associations. This language is continually evolving around an existing set of elements that is applied in varying contexts. Planet-like spheres seem to drift aroundthe paintings´ surfaces on impulse of elegant systems of fine wire constructs. These vectoral wires are connected by hinges allowing them to move in any direction. Humanoid figures with a defined action radius epitomize nature and technology fusing ever more. Fields of asymmetric white rectangles and squares with black ones interjected allude to a piano. A small black quadrangle seems to drift away from the larger entity, emancipating itself to become a code of its own, disappearing and reappearing in other places.
 

The artistic process of bringing together subjectively charged pictorial elements in apparently unrelated constellations is an essential characteristic of surrealism. The associative combination of symbolic elements emphasizes Maier´s proximity to the surrealist approach - however, reflected through a distinctly contemporary lens. His cryptic and poetic symbols are connected within a system of a coded visual language. They seem to playfully interact with one another as parts of kinetic mechanical units with invisible dynamics, communicating in a ciphered vocabulary. Dense areas alternate with open expanses of clear and defined colors. His painting techniques shift between three-dimensionality and flatness, between crisp contours and open flows, between a conscious and an intuitive application. He places a special focus on the edges of the paintings, appreciating them as the interfaces between inner and outer worlds and thus, as integral parts of the works. The canvasses, often boxed in enclosures that themselves are painted or that physically extend into the surrounding space, seem to be framed by windows, underlining the otherworldliness of the scenes depicted - scenes that are surreal compositions of abstract fragments from his mind, formulated in a visual language of poetic codes.

Text: Kristina von Bülow

About Frank Maier :

Frank Maier, who grew up in Stuttgart, completed his master's studies as a sculptor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe before moving to Vienna in 1996, and Munich in 1998. Based in Berlin since 2006, he has taught at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning of the UdK’s Department of Visual Arts. His works have been shown at the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt; L40, Berlin; Beers, London; and the Quingdao Sculpture Center in China; among others. He has had solo exhibitions at various galleries, including Ben Kaufmann, Munich/Berlin; Drawing Room, Hamburg; and the Kienzle Art Foundation, Berlin.