Klara Meinhardt: CONCEPT ROOM
With CONCEPT ROOM, Klara Meinhardt opens the 2024 exhibition season for the winter tour. The exhibition presents the artist's latest works, which range from heavy steel and concrete works to fine, deep blue cyanotopias on paper and canvas.
While Klara Meinhardt's previous gallery exhibition in 2022 focused thematically on identity-forming environments, in CONCEPT ROOM the artist now brings together and continues various strands from her work in terms of form, technique and content. Once more there is a focus on people's relationship to their own bodies, and the diverse cultural practices and techniques involved in shaping and improving the human body. The largest room of her most recent exhibition, however, focuses on another relationship: that between animals and humans. Cyanotypes, which take up the patterns of animal fur, scales and skin, adorn the walls of the room. The two heavy steel chairs invite visitors to take a seat and look at the prints and sculptural objects, which are presented like hunting trophies.
In its materiality, the steel cow skin placed in the room refers to the alienation of nature by humans and can be read as an anthropocentric or more generally as an anthropological metaphor: the need for humans to appropriate nature with technology and engineering leads to a whole new spectrum of relations and practices targeting the self and the surrounding world. Moments of utilization, e.g. of animal skins, and the natural requirement of dressing oneself alternate with the desire to adorn oneself as an aesthetic extension, as an aesthetic form of communication and lifestyle. The use of patterns of animal skins and hides ultimately becomes an inflationary decorative element in human living environments, like an exaggerated basic need to dress up, somewhere between fashion and object fetish. Both formally and technically, Kla ra Meinhardt translates her thoughts and observations on this complex of themes into her works in a varied and sophisticated way, whether through collage techniques, superimposition, enrichment of the canvas fabric or sculptural imitations of petrification.
Klara Meinhardt *1987 in Dresden | lives and works in Leipzig | 2006-2011 diploma studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts | 2013-14 studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the class of Monica Bonvicini | 2012-15 master student studies with Joachim Blank at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig | 2017-2019 teaching assignment in the Media Art department of the Academy of Visual Arts (Leipzig) | 2016 assistant in the studio of media artist Philippe Durand, Paris (FR) | Klara Meinhardt has been awarded numerous work scholarships and residencies | She has taken part in national and international exhibitions with her works, including at the Grassi Museum für Grassi Museum of Applied Arts (Leipzig, 2015), Darmstädter Sezession (2016), Triennale in Geneva (2019) and Museum der Bildenden Künste (2020, Leipzig).
