HAMBURG.- The Drawing Room is presenting new works by the Berlin-based artist Frank Maier (born 1966 in Stuttgart). For his first solo exhibition at the Drawing Room, Maier has created wall paintings reminiscent of colour fields, which form the background for his graphically well-defined, yet intricate works, painted in pastose acrylic on canvas in a retro-modernist style. He draws his material from the repertoire of forms used in concrete art and by the Russian Constructivist artists, in order to create his own self-referencing architecture of images.
Within the borders of the inner pictorial space, marked with colour, the artist uses geometrical vocabulary in a stringent and consistent manner. For Maier, the paintings do not portray life or reality but are themselves part of this life and this reality – living beings. The line plays an important role in his painting and therefore the delicate border lines define the hermetically closed pictorial space, which is mounted on painted wooden boxes, hence making it threedimensional. Inside this space, the line resembles a thread, stretched across the painted surface, linking the geometrical elements, intersecting and undercutting them. The subsequent constellations created between the individual elements of the picture, such as parallel lines and intersections, connection and separation or consolidation and dispersal, also involve the viewer on an emotional level in Maier's idiosyncratic, abstract visual universe.
"Maier, like someone playing at billiards, designs possible runs of the play for his picture fields. However, the results are never clear because they are designed as wafting constellations. Maier plays his game in a closed world, wherein each picture echoes the other one“ (Stephan Berg, The Mirror Cabinet of Images, in Related Structures, Kienzle Art Foundation, Berlin, 2012, p. 11).
According to the artist, the exhibition title Melon Man & Crab Shakes is a reference to a very serious yet also humorous reality present in the exhibition. The four-piece Melon Man is on show on the grey wall of the Drawing Room and works from the Crabs series, based on a green-and-pink wall painting, are also presented.
For Frank Maier, the element of the real plays a substantial role in the abstract. It guides him in the search for the visual subject and helps him develop a methodological visual language with a modular structure. Maier is not concerned with portraying optical reality in his paintings but is interested rather in elementary questions: What is painting able to portray that no other medium or no other artistic technique is able to visualise? What makes it special and what role does the artistic subject itself play here? What does painting have to do with Frank Maier's identity as a human being and what is the importance of his experience for visual reality? It is this lustful solemnity that inspires Frank Maier to question both himself and the painting, at the same time touching on the existentialist theme inherent in painting as a historical tradition.
Born in 1966 in Stuttgart, Frank Maier lives and works in Berlin. Following his studies of sculpture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 1989 to 1995 he received a graduate residency grant in Vienna awarded by the state of Baden-Württemberg in 1996. Works by Frank Maier are represented in the following collections, among others: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Kienzle Art Foundation, Berlin.
