Meret Kern
Untitled, 2022/2023
24 drawings with gouache on paper, charcoal on paper, charcoal and gouache on paper, pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm, 76 x 112 cm, 50 x 70 cm, 53 x 76 cm, 150 x 248 cm
Courtesy the artist
Meret Kern works with gouache and more recently with charcoal on paper. She has also mastered the techniques of photography and digital drawing. Numerous drawings have been created for the exhibition, of which only a selection is presented, filling the room as a painterly installation.
Kern’s working method is rapid. It emerges from the constant repetition of a painterly act – and the intensity of a momentary mood. The artist searches for her figures with a practice akin to automatic painting. Working without a model, her central motifs are heads and busts. The figures are created by pouring paint onto paper impregnated with water, which is then laid out to dry. Her painting materials are gouache, pencil and charcoal pencil.
In the resulting areas of colour, the artist draws minimal interventions with fine brush marks to articulate individual physiognomic elements. An ear, the mouth, teeth and nipples are elaborated. Often, only individual elements create areas of colour from the abstract. Kern’s painting is suspended between abstraction and figuration.
The eyes and the gaze of the figures on the viewer are always key. We see stylised faces reduced to the essential, not portraits of existing people. Kern does not seek to depict the individual head, rather the closest possible approximation to inner topographies.
In the charcoal drawings, the line is the essential element. Kern blurs this selectively, thus creating plasticity and shadows on the bodies. She draws and paints in a continuous process, an intensive creative flow, on the lookout for forms, expression and feelings until a face appears familiar. Feelings that have become form, mental moods captured on paper in human faces.
Meret Kern hunts for the essence of expression. Almost obsessively, she repeatedly paints in search of true feelings, the expression that encapsulates being human that is etched into faces by time and the years. Her figures, neither embellished nor idealised, bear the inscriptions of their inner worlds in skin and flesh. They reveal characteristics of time, imperfections verging on ugliness that is touching. These mostly bald beings gaze at us in melancholy silence. Her figures are never given a surrounding space, nor a structure to hold them. They stand alone and isolated in the void.
Meret Kern (*1997 in Frankfurt am Main, DE) grew up in Hamburg and lives and works in Frankfurt am Main (DE). She has been a student at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (DE) with Prof. Heiner Blum since 2019, with a focus on drawing, painting and photography. Meret Kern exhibits her work at the following institutions, among others: noroomgalery, Hamburg (DE) Zollamt Galerie, Offenbach am Main (DE), Magma Maria, Offenbach am Main (DE), Kunstverein Familie Montez, Frankfurt am Main (DE).
