MATTHIAS MEYER
Vom tatsächlich Sichtbaren
Opening: Thursday, March 15., 2012 at 7.00 p.m.
Duration of the Exhibition:
March 16., 2012 – May 05., 2012
Galerie Andreas Binder is pleased to present On What Is Really Seen, a solo exhibition by the German artist Matthias Meyer.
Playing abstraction and figuration off against each other as if they were irreconcilable opposites has become a ritual in painting. This dichotomy – complete with the two opposing camps to which it has given rise – has persistently (and even against better judgement) been with us since the early days of modernism. Now, however, a younger generation of painters, able to glide seamlessly between the two poles, appears to have succeeded in consigning this anachronistic dividing line to the vestiges of art history.
Among the artists belonging to the phalanx of this movement in Germany –thanks mainly to the technical and conceptual accomplishment of his method of applying layer upon layer of glaze – is Matthias Meyer. ‘I’m not even sure if abstract paintings exist at all’, declares the artist born in Göttingen. Yet the imagery of his oil paintings is so diffuse that one could equally well ask whether figurative paintings exist in his work at all. ‘On What Is Really Seen’ thus admonishes us to review the phenomenology of painting again and again with a view to laying bare its deceptive character. The extent to which the illusory thematic complexes of Meyer’s works have grown and become increasingly enmeshed is subject to this exhibition.
