Heiner Meyer
born 1953 in Bielefeld, Germany
In 1973 Heiner Meyer worked as an assistant of Salvador Dali.
In 1981 graduation from the Fine Art Academy in Braunschweig, Germany with the master student award.
Lives and works in Bielefeld, Germany
Heiner Meyer’s painting is characterized by consistency and undogmatic intransigence, and likewise by the principles of an arte sull’arte – art whose primary theme is art itself. In his works, he confidently layers quotes and adaptations of a wide range of sources one above the other and in doing so demonstrates the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. Classic Greek sculptures, portraits of movie stars from the fifties, Mickey Mouse and other comic-book characters, butterflies, and cubes are the recurring set pieces in Meyer’s idiom and quoted in ever-new constellations and confrontations.
This subjective iconography is reconstructed from picture to picture; there is no connecting or even binding scheme. Meyer’s art is always a new creation – never repetition; his painterly vocabulary is declined and conjugated in a different way in each work. In the process, the artists never lapses into the suggestion of his models – that is, the pictures that were there before his; both the stars of antique mythology as well as the Hollywood stars are quoted from a relativizing distance; their aura is processed and not venerated! It is out of this distance to his themes that Meyer achieves the absolute freedom in his painting, in which the sublime appears alongside the trivial, past alongside present, realistic alongside abstract, elite alongside popular.