Anna Meyer
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After remodeling an old fire station and turning it into an exhibition space for contemporary art, Michael Kienzer and a local Jury invited artists to create temporary installations that would last half a year and would also be visible from the outside through a large window. He thus transformed the entire building into a sculpture in public space.
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In this work, Anna Meyer explores portrait painting as a fundamental genre of art history that has always been regarded as a way of lending us insight into the moral values, status, and life worlds of the people portrayed. The artist, who began painting portraits of her friends several years ago, saw the invitation for the Kunstraum Weikendorf as a good excuse to begin a new series of pictures. The architect Robert Hanel, who is familiar with the area, helped her with the project. They visited different parts of the community together and convinced local inhabitants to let her paint their portrait in the same format as her friends. By juxtaposing these two groups of portraits in the exhibition, she created a gallery of self-presentation that not only resembles typical photographs of friends in social networks, but also demonstrates those aspects that are both different as well as shared. Anna Meyer thus created a subjective collective portrait of life in a rural area, to which the portraits of her friends serve as a kind of comparison. In addition to presenting a kind of painterly survey of current forms of self-presentation, Anna Meyer’s project also explores to what extent the – for some people still strict – lines between urban and rural life are breaking down today.
(Martin Fritz)
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