Klara Meinhardt: Kontakt
5 March—16 April 2022
We are pleased to announce the new solo exhibition of Klara Meinhardt. Entitled »Kontakt«, the artist will be showing primarily works created between 2019 and 2021. In a stimulating combination, the exhibition thereby unites cyanotypes on paper and canvas with concrete sculptures and ›Soft Sculptures‹ made of textile.
»Thematically, I deal with the human being and its identity-forming space,« Klara Meinhardt summarizes the starting point of her work. In terms of content, her latest exhibition is influenced by her work stays in Athens [GR] and Mulhouse [FR] and deals primarily with urban spaces as complex haptic landscapes. Architecture, flora and fauna as well as historical influences are reflected in the artworks, which is reflected motivically as well as in the choice of materials and artistic techniques. In particular, Meinhardt's stay in Mulhouse, a city in France marked by its history as a center of the textile industry, plays a significant role.
The concrete of Meinhardt's sculptures refers to modern urbanity, as do the multilayered, motif-hybridizing compositions of the large-format cyanotypes. The hard modern cuts of the Soft Sculptures, for which cyanotypes on canvas take the form of garments and are transformed into sculptural form, also refer once again to Klara Meinhardt's claim to undertake a double reflection on the aesthetics and history of the materials and techniques of her choice: namely, to tap the media of her art for their properties, attributions of meaning, and their cultural-historical references, to bring them into new contexts, and in the process to make fascinating statements in the context of their themes and motifs. Often, contemporary phenomena such as social practices around the human body, the human-animal relationship, or the valence of materiality are considered in critical exaggeration. [...]
Klara Meinhardt *1987 in Dresden | lives and works in Leipzig 2006-2011 Diploma studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden | 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 | Teaching assistant in the class of Joachim Blank at the HGB Leipzig | 2016 Assistant in the studio of media artist Philippe Durand, Paris [FR] | In Leipzig, works by Klara Meinhardt were last exhibited in the group exhibition »Zero Waste« at the Museum der Bildenden Künste.
»Thematically, I deal with the human being and its identity-forming space,« Klara Meinhardt summarizes the starting point of her work. In terms of content, her latest exhibition is influenced by her work stays in Athens [GR] and Mulhouse [FR] and deals primarily with urban spaces as complex haptic landscapes. Architecture, flora and fauna as well as historical influences are reflected in the artworks, which is reflected motivically as well as in the choice of materials and artistic techniques. In particular, Meinhardt's stay in Mulhouse, a city in France marked by its history as a center of the textile industry, plays a significant role.
The concrete of Meinhardt's sculptures refers to modern urbanity, as do the multilayered, motif-hybridizing compositions of the large-format cyanotypes. The hard modern cuts of the Soft Sculptures, for which cyanotypes on canvas take the form of garments and are transformed into sculptural form, also refer once again to Klara Meinhardt's claim to undertake a double reflection on the aesthetics and history of the materials and techniques of her choice: namely, to tap the media of her art for their properties, attributions of meaning, and their cultural-historical references, to bring them into new contexts, and in the process to make fascinating statements in the context of their themes and motifs. Often, contemporary phenomena such as social practices around the human body, the human-animal relationship, or the valence of materiality are considered in critical exaggeration. [...]
Klara Meinhardt *1987 in Dresden | lives and works in Leipzig 2006-2011 Diploma studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden | 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 | Teaching assistant in the class of Joachim Blank at the HGB Leipzig | 2016 Assistant in the studio of media artist Philippe Durand, Paris [FR] | In Leipzig, works by Klara Meinhardt were last exhibited in the group exhibition »Zero Waste« at the Museum der Bildenden Künste.