GfZK

In her pictures Anna Meyer confronts and contrasts competing discourses about truth, spotlighting social and personal conflicts. Decaying industrial buildings, leisure parks, pictures of friends and role models, glittering metropolises, shopping centres, homeless people, modern and traditional nomads, and time and again the artist herself – juxtaposed either in individual pictures or in series of works. Realistic looking objects are placed next to abstract set pieces, familiar elements become unfamiliar by the use of scale or colour, and fragments of pictures appear next to slogans, sections of text or single words. The use of photographs, advertising motifs, lyrics, her own invented words and pictures as well as autobiographical elements produces hybrid pictures in which texts or individual words, torn out of their context, are placed in contrast to the subjects or are used to create paradoxes: "better is worse", "now is then", "right is wrong". Stylistically, Meyer's work appears disparate from series to series. The media also change: thus the Japan pictures are painted on canvas in Impressionistic style (underlined by the title – Internet Impressionism) while Homeless-Müllness is painted in realistic manner on aluminium panels. Meyer draws on a pool of visual and textual stimuli for her subjects. She also refers to painting and the history of art in her visual language – Impressionism, Realism, Pop Art ... In the sculptures, the principle of hybridity and mixing becomes even clearer: Meyer builds model cities out of packaging, perfume bottles, discarded mobile phones and toy figures, generally painted over. In Meyer's paintings, sculptures and installations, the perception of (urban) reality is characterized by superimposing various elements of a global consumerist culture and of growing capitalism – such as the mass media, advertising and shopping. However, the negative sides of increasing capitalism – loneliness, the exclusion of those who cannot participate in a capitalist system and the resulting social conflicts – are not brushed under the carpet. Glitz and glamour, consumer promise and the production of desire come face-to-face with people who seem to lack goals or direction, as well as marginal groups ejected from the social network.

In her pictures Anna Meyer confronts and contrasts competing discourses about truth, spotlighting social and personal conflicts. She includes her own artistic and personal life in this examination. The need to live with contradictions, recognizing that a right always also implies a wrong, a now also a then, a correct an incorrect – these are some of the basic assumptions in Meyer's work. Operating within contradictions sharpens our awareness of different perspectives and truths. If these are not forcibly ironed out, it becomes impossible to take a single, "correct" position or the one "true" perspective. It keeps our eyes open to alternative points of view. In her work, Meyer's often argues that "right is wrong". It is an argument that allows us to leave behind our own absolute point of view and begin to see from different perspectives.

At the same time as the exhibition in the GfZK, MINI Leipzig at Alte Messe (Old Exhibition Centre) Leipzig is presenting work by Anna Meyer, and visitors can travel back and forth between the two locations. With the invitation from MINI Leipzig Meyer has taken the opportunity of taking a critical look at the brand world of MINI in a spatial installation. Large-format canvasses showing various cities around the world hang from the ceiling, and along with transparent films, architectural models and an outside billboard come up against cars, advertisements and merchandising products for MINI to combine into a conglomerate of global culture.

On the occasion of the exhibition by Anna Meyer in the GfZK in Leipzig, a book entitled “Internetionale”, which extensively documents her projects to date, will appear in English and German in mid-November. It includes contributions by Patricia Grzonka, Peter Hein (Fehlfarben), Julia Schäfer, Raimar Stange, Barbara Steiner, Susanne Titz and Yvonne Volkart, with graphics by Tom Unverzagt, Leipzig

Anna Meyer was born in Schaffhausen in 1964. She studied at the design academies in Zurich and Lucerne, and spent longer periods of study in Fujino, Japan, Los Angeles, USA and Mönchengladbach, Germany, amongst other places. In her paintings and large-format billboards for public spaces she is concerned with the global consumer society and its resulting displacement of living conditions. Anna Meyer is a member of the board of the Association of Visual Artists, Vienna Secession. She lives and works in Vienna and Schaffhausen. She also creates fashion collections in collaboration with the Tokyo-based designer Edwina Hörl.

The exhibition is funded by Pro Helvetia and the BKA Austria. With the kind support of MINI Leipzig.