MATTHIAS MEYER

About

In the second solo exhibition of Matthias Meyer, Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf shows latest works of the artist. As a former master student of Gerhard Richter and student of Dieter Krieg, Matthias Meyer is taking up an important position in contemporary art. Works of the artist are part of outstanding art collections worldwide and have international visibility.

The origin of his works are photographs of urban- or landscape motifs, taken on journeys or found at the internet, used for initial preliminary acrylic sketches, in which the composition and color fields are already defined. Matthias Meyer transmits the spatial structure on the blank canvas, without preparatory drawing and creates a deep structure that shines through the layers of color in an almost phantasmagorical way.

The rapid brushwork of the artist, due to the wet-on-wet technique with extremely dilute oil paint, is manifested in the ease of paint application and the transparency of single color layers. The representational associations of nature- or architecture elements dissolve and lose themselves in the overall structure of the painting.

In his latest works the “enigmatic atmospheric” comes to the fore of painting by Matthias Meyer. While figurative associations were recognizable in his earlier works, they are now almost resolved in the overlapping layers of color. It is the pure painting, faced by the viewer, who loses himself in its complexity and multidimensionality.

Exemplary is the work "Zurich", 2014 in which nothing more than a glimpse of the original scene of a subway station is visible - the picture alternates between the actual visual experience, just imaginable in the shiny areas of the art lights and in the spatial depth of the subway platform, transformed into the medium of painting through Matthias Meyer’s condensed and subjective memory.