Press Release
James Colman is pleased to present "Heads", a solo exhibition of portraits by the German painter Harding Meyer.
Meyer’s appropriated images taken from film, TV and video stills act as an insidious leveller. These thinly veiled paintings explore the personal psychology of media personalities and anonymous people, wiping out the individual traits of the celebrity whilst boosting the ego of the unknown to the same surface blur of the screen.
Painted in a horizontal format reminiscent of the cinema, the size of each portrait is disproportionate to the artist’s perceived status of his subject.
Similarly, by giving the background of the portrait an equal measure of contextualization to the head, Meyer creates a new personality, part artifice, part born from his own formative experiences.
The gaze of the depicted person purposely never engages with the viewer’s eyes. The expressions range from pensiveness to disdain but more frequently to a quiet blandness, staring out into the distance, inviting multiple interpretation.
Harding Meyer studied at the Kunstakademie in Karlsruhe and was awarded the Helmut-Stober-Prize for Painting in 1999. His work forms part of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Media Conglomerate,The Diewelt Newspaper and the Italian Arte Magazine Collections.
This is exhibition is part of an exchange programme in association with Galerie Voss, Düsseldorf, Germany.
