Mike Meiré
‚Outside the Visible‘

London

Outside the Visible is Mike Meiré’s second solo exhibition with Bartha Contemporary. Featuring eight sculptures and thirteen flat pieces, it embodies the essence of Meiré’s oeuvre: works that question the status quo of society as well as the artist himself.

As the title suggests, the exhibition focuses not just on what we see, but what we don’t see, and how that still makes an impact. The works on display reject existing information to establish new meanings within new orders. This is apparent both in the individual works and in the exhibition as a whole.

Meiré’s obsessive interest in newsprint as a medium of communication began when NZZ, Neue Züricher Zeitung, asked him to redesign the look of the newspaper. He says he is fascinated by how our daily chaos is pressed into a grid, uniting the structured and unstructured, the conscious and unconscious, the clash of nature and culture.

Outside the Visible presents twelve works inspired by newspapers: their structures decoded through the zooming into and fading out of specific sections. All share an imperfection in their perfection, embracing the wrinkles formed by the dried lacquer paint.

The works reflect on the issues that surround our everyday lives, emphasizing the here and the now, as well as the constantly changing present and its lasting impact on our individual lives. They also eternalize a medium typically designed to be consumed within one day. This is borne out in the bronze and nickel-cast title of the artworks: Eternal News Series.

In this way, Meiré questions the way we consume news today. Since the dawn of the digital era, we have been deluged with a constant flow of ephemeral information. The sense of eternal ‚news‘, therefore, brings up a whole new meaning.

One work – In the Flat Field - serves as an autobiography of sorts. It recounts the very first moment Meiré got in touch with art. He was listening to the British post-punk band Bauhaus and looking at the cover of its album In the Flat Field when he suddenly discovered he wanted to learn more about it. Meiré then headed to the library to do more research, which led him to the eponymous German school of design that remains a significant source of inspiration today: the idea of advocating the classic while freeing it from its constraints to engender new structures.

Black Relief, a sculpture made from black packaging, gives viewers a deeper understanding of Meiré’s mindset. On one side is a structured piece – the grid he works in – but on the other side, it breaks away. It’s a metaphor for how Meiré constantly challenges and questions himself. More broadly, it shows how this can be applied to our wider society: we live in times when there is clarity on one side, and problems and its associated questions and answers on the other.

Exercise on the Human Condition are round and linear sculptures that question gender norms. The curvy forms could represent the female while the linear shapes could be seen as the male. Close together, but not as one, they make a whole – one formed by the adjunction of many individual elements overlapping and embracing each other.

The curvilinear realms overcome straight planks in a sculptural representation of gender equality – almost to the point where the role of the man is blurred. Men losing their points of reference is shown by being swallowed up under imposing womanized schemes, yet the manly form still stands as the base to stabilize the upper female sculpture – proof that the fundamentals of society have yet to be fully calibrated.

The Drone Chair is a sculpture whose sharp lines combining metallic and orange tones refer to the present technological era. Its upper structure recalls the multitude of antennae that allow us to remain permanently connected across place and time. The title is a direct reference to the flying machines that capture data and images from above, juxtaposed against the most grounded of objects – a chair.

The union of antithetical elements – the ephemeral and the eternal in Eternal News Series, the structured and the fragmented in In the Flat Field, the manly and womanly in Exercise on the Human Condition, and the technological with the artisanal in Drone Chair – forms the basic tension and essence of Outside the Visible.

Mike Meiré, ARCHITECTURE AND MORALITY II 2016, laquer-paint on newspaper, 63,5 x 45,5 x 4 cm, Grid Painting 50 x 35,5 cm


Mike Meiré, ABSOLUTE STRUCTURES 2016, ceramic, 74 x 25 x 100,5 cm, Plinth 36 x 25 x 100,5 cm, Slab 50,5 x 25,5 x 5 cm (each) Figure 33 x 25 x 23 cm

Mike Meiré, ELEMENT 47, (ETERNAL NEWS SERIES) 2016, nickel silver cast of a newspaper, unique cast, 48 x 34,5 x 2 cm


Mike Meiré, DRONE CHAIR, 2016, nickel silver, acrylic and spray paint, 105 x 73 x 60 cm

Mike Meiré

Bartha Contemporary

July 8 – September 17, 2016

25 Margaret Street
London W1W 8RX
United Kingdom

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