Hans-Jörg Mayer
15 Mar - 26 Apr 2014
HANS-JÖRG MAYER
Basics
15 March - 26 April 2014
For his new exhibition, Hans-Jörg Mayer paints tulips, not pictures. Tulips that rise up into the clear white canvases as if they had grown there. They accomplish it without illusion, as the flowing drippings directly point to the liquid-like manner of painting.
HJM’s career started in the 1980ies with the rejection of all expressivity. His painting is embedded in a tradition of highly reflected art. Against the newly discovered expressionism he sets a very thoughtful art, leading him into two directions: figurative painting between realism and pop-art on the one hand and typefaces with the aesthetics of advertisements and record covers on the other hand. Over time the backgrounds of the figurative paintings disappear in favor of an indefinite, white emptiness. Starting again from zero, painting and hereby taking the own scepticism just as serious that nothing comes into question that wants more than exactely this. In this regard the tulips are to be understood as painted scepticism. They emerge as a consequence of an artistic development in the painterly tradition of scepticism towards the impossibilty of truth in art and after modernism.
Basics
15 March - 26 April 2014
For his new exhibition, Hans-Jörg Mayer paints tulips, not pictures. Tulips that rise up into the clear white canvases as if they had grown there. They accomplish it without illusion, as the flowing drippings directly point to the liquid-like manner of painting.
HJM’s career started in the 1980ies with the rejection of all expressivity. His painting is embedded in a tradition of highly reflected art. Against the newly discovered expressionism he sets a very thoughtful art, leading him into two directions: figurative painting between realism and pop-art on the one hand and typefaces with the aesthetics of advertisements and record covers on the other hand. Over time the backgrounds of the figurative paintings disappear in favor of an indefinite, white emptiness. Starting again from zero, painting and hereby taking the own scepticism just as serious that nothing comes into question that wants more than exactely this. In this regard the tulips are to be understood as painted scepticism. They emerge as a consequence of an artistic development in the painterly tradition of scepticism towards the impossibilty of truth in art and after modernism.