HARDING MEYER – THE OTHERS
2016-08-29Although he has occasionally painted three-quarter and even full-length figures, the works for which Harding Meyer is best known are por -traits of mass-media “models” whose faces are cropped in such a manner that focus is on the area between hairline and chin. When he left behind an earlier abstract phase by taking family photographs as a source of motifs, Meyer found ways of focalizing human physiognomy. “I didn’t have to look for models,” he recently re- flected. “I realized soon that painting an un- known person permitted me to be free to de- velop my own style.” 1 In deriving much of his
imagery from advertising, fashion magazines and the Internet, along with stills of television talk shows, Meyer demonstrates a certain affinity to Andy Warhol, who monumentalized and memorialized found imagery in his silk-screened paintings. One is perhaps tempted to think of Meyer’s portraits as giving his sub- jects the “fifteen minutes of fame” that Warhol had once promised. One can also view Meyer’s massmedia models from a radically different vantage point: as images rescued through art from the flood of visual information that threatens to engulf our perception of reality.
Opposite – o.T. (15-2016)
Exhibition runs through to November 5th, 2016
Galerie Voss
Mühlengasse 3
D-40213 Düsseldorf
Germany
