Matthias Meyer „Stream – Water Landscapes“

Galerie Martina Kaiser is delighted to dedicate its first solo exhibition in Cologne to Matthias Meyer. In "Stream - Water Landscapes", the artist presents lucid portraits that trace the fascination of the element of water. 

Does abstract painting even exist as an independent genre? Or does the reduction of forms and diffusion of colours not rather lead to the genesis of new representational phenomena?

Matthias Meyer pursues this thesis in his pictorial worlds and focuses in the exhibition "Stream - Water Landscapes" on precisely that element that belongs neither to abstraction nor to pure materiality: water as a flowing substance, without perspective and yet dimensional, not tangible but nevertheless materially present, forms the thematic basis for Gerhard Richter's master student. However, he is not concerned with a superficial fixation on the motif of water, but rather with its effect on the surface.

He endows his water portraits with independent characteristics, immersing them in varying polychrome reflections of brown and violet blue tones ("Jamaica Bay"), iridescent shades of green and blue ("Lake") or light landscapes interspersed only with ink-like formations ("Shore"). The fact that they do not provide a fixed point of view - and are therefore without as well as multi-perspective - and are characterised by blurriness, gives them an indirect, unreal quality - which allows for a wide range of interpretation. This is precisely Matthias Meyer's aim; always keeping his paintings "in flux" and subject to permanent change, he wants to work out the unconscious between motif and viewer, to visualize the streams of thought and reflections that arise both on the part of the artist during the painting process and during the visual conquest by the viewer.

This is also alluded to once again in the exhibition title "Stream". It revolves around the intermediate space between the original experience of reality and time-shifted reproduction or reception, a kind of memory of reality to which Matthias Meyer refers. This effect is intensified by the intrinsic sketchiness of his works, in which the clarity of the drawing is directly transferred to the large format, thus enabling the picture to develop independently. Matthias Meyer refers here to the independence of the painting, which he allows spontaneity and freedom in the painting process in order to realise itself from within.

The almost glassy appearance of his works is due to the glazed applications, which give the underlying oil paint an almost unreal translucency. The light shines out of the painting and evokes a window effect, where the motifs take place on two levels, i.e. on and below the surface of the water. This gives the works immense depth and reinforces their imaginary aura, where the dichotomy of abstraction and objectivity seems to be completely cancelled out. (Yorca Schmidt-Junker)

Matthias Meyer (*1969) lives and works in Mülheim an der Ruhr. He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, became a master student of Gerhard Richter and then continued his training with Prof. Dieter Krieg. His work has been honoured with various awards, including the Max-Ernst Scholarship (1994) and the Ruhr Prize for Art and Science (2023). He has had gallery exhibitions in Europe, Japan and the USA, complemented by museum exhibitions at the Kunstverein Leverkusen (2014), the Kunstmuseum Mülheim a.d. Ruhr (2017) and most recently the Kunstverein Speyer ("Rug Paintings", 2024), among others. In addition to numerous international private collections, he is also represented in many renowned corporate collections, including Deutsche Bank/Frankfurt, Hypo Bank/Munich, Willy-Brandt Haus/Berlin and the Swiss Bankers Association/London.