Heiner Meyer

Reloaded

Heiner Meyer’s painting is characterized by consistency and an undogmatic reluctance to compromise as well as by the principles of arte sull’arte – art of which the primary subject is art. With superior ease he lays quotes and adaptations from a wide variety of sources one upon the other, thereby demonstrating the synchronity of non-synchronicity. Sculptures from classical Greek antiquity, portraits of movie stars of the 1950s, Mickey Mouse and other comic book characters, butterflies, cubes-these are the recurring set pieces of Meyer’s pictorial language, which he quotes in ever newer constellations and confrontations. This subjective iconography is reconstituted from picture to picture. Meyer’s art is always a new creation, never a repetition. His pictorial vocabulary is declined and conjugated in a different way in each of his works. In doing so, the artist is never slave to the influence of his examples-both the stars of Greek mythology as well as the Hollywood stars are quoted from a relativizing distance; their aura is used, not worshipped! It is out of this distance to his subject matter that Meyer attains the absolute freedom of his painting, in which the sublime appears alongside the trivial, the past alongside the present, the realistic alongside the abstract, and the elitist alongside the popular.