May 16th–June 30th2008
Vernissage: Friday 16th May, h 7.00 pm
Galleria Paola Verrengia is delighted to announce First View, the solo exhibition of Harding Meyer, featuring a new series of portraits (oil on canvas).
The artistic research of Harding Meyer is characterized by the trial to catch faces and expressions of an anonymous people, taken from the rich inheritance of images, broadcast by television or cinema, published on magazines or on the web. An indistinct crowd is painted on his large pictures: they are male and female faces, generally young and charming, but there are old people and kids, as well, different for age, sex and skin’s colour. Meyer observes, selects and translates them on his canvases, exasperating, above all, the gaze’s upsetting power. Meyer paints them without any stereotyped image, in order to lead the spectator to approach them without prejudices and to dwell on them expressivity. In order to create this sense of neutrality of the images, a monochrome and uniform background is often part of his portraits, excluding, in this way, the surrounding environment and forcing the spectator to observe and focus just on the face’s appearance. Instead of vertical line, typical of the traditional portraits, Meyer prefers to use the horizontal format, in order to fix the face on the canvas as a static image, in order to give an infinitive sense, to create a waiting, as if the scene painted on the picture had to continue within the near portrait (Licia Spagnesi, 2006). What makes his portraits something infinitive is his great ability to create unfocused atmospheres, by the rarefied use of the colour (spread with large brushing and several palette-knife’s swipes), and to reinterpret the models, in the passage from the photographic snapshot to the final result on the canvas:
Each face is an enigma for me […], but I don’t want resolve this enigma, neither give the solution. I prefer and give it to the spectator as it is.
Herding Meyer (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1964) lives and works in Germany. He got degree on 1993 and on 1999 won Helmut Stober prize. Recently, he showed at GALERIE VOSS, DÜSSELDORF, LAUSBERGCONTEMPORARY, Toronto (CAN) (2007) -OBER GALLERY, Kent (USA) (2006) -MUSEUM LJETNJIKOVCA, Montenegro; COFA/ CLAIRE OLIVER FINE ART, New York (2004) -GALLERIA MARIO SEQUEIRA, Braga (Portogallo) (2003) -GALERIE JAHN, LANDSHUT -JAMES COLMAN GALLERY, London (2002) -GALERIE DAMASQUINE & AEROPLASTICS, Brüssel (2001).
Special thanks to GALERIE VOSS, Düsseldorf.
