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Harding Meyer Portrait Painting Workshop 5 p.m 8 p.m : Sunday to Thursday 3 p.m 8 p.m : Friday and Saturday Fee: Free Limit of Participants: 12 Artists On occasion of Katara Galleries Exhibition “Eye to Eye”, with Portrait Paintings by Brazilian born artist Harding Meyer, the artist will be in residence at the Katara Art Studios from the 7th of May to the 15th of May 2013. He will be directing a workshop where he will show how he creates his portrait paintings.   Harding will show the medial character and origin of his work, then the long and complex process of painting, with which he slows and reanimates the pictures.   The artist will go into detail on his painting technique and create portraits with the participants.   At the end of the 7 day portrait painting workshop the Katara Art Studios will organize an impromptu exhibition of all the portraits produced during the workshop for which all friends and family members of the participating artists are invited to attend.   Materials the participants should bring to the workshop:Hardcopy and Softcopy Photograph of the subject chosen for the portrait paintingPersonal Mixing Pallet (also available at the studios)Preferred Acrylic paint colors (participants should bring their own preferred brand of acrylic colors)2 canvas (minimum size 1m x 1m) for the portrait they intent to develop. 1 for the portrait itself and a supplementary one in case any accidents happen during the development of the portrait   To Learn More about Harding Meyer and his work, please visit: http://hardingmeyer.tumblr.com/ The Face of the Present Portraits by Harding Meyer By Philipp Holstein Harding Meyer paints faces, just faces, but the first thing one notices is their eyes. They are at the centre of the 48 year old artist's work; they are its core element. They catch the viewer's eye; they literally force him into the picture. The neck of the portrayed persons is cut off and their hair line is barely visible. The persons he portrays are present in an eerie way: Meyer always hangs his large size works so that the pair of eyes in the painting is at eye level. The viewer hardly can avoid those eyes and he is unable to interrupt communications. This makes Meyer’s art so powerful. Harding Meyer was borne in Porto Alegre/Brazil in 1964. In 1987, he started his studies atKarlsruheArtAcademyunder Professor Max Kaminski, and then he moved on to study under Professor Helmut Dorner, who, in turn, was a student of Gerhard Richter atDüsseldorfArtAcademy. Today, Meyer lives and works nearKarlsruhe. Meyer has been painting faces for the past 15 years. Working on canvas is only part of the artist's creative process. At first, he looks for models and browses through magazines, TV programmes, and the web, in particular. It is the gut feeling that decides, he says, he does not choose a photo out of sympathy or because it shows a beautiful face. Nor is he interested in the background story, and so he removes each photo from its original context. All his paintings are untitled and celebrities can no longer be identified, just as the Kurdish girl who died in a combat. Meyer takes a picture of the PC screen and directly prints from the World Wide Web onto paper size DIN A 4. He projects this picture onto the canvas, sketches his motive in the proper format, and in this first step already, he places the eyes at the level he likes, in most cases slightly above the lower half of the picture. Then Meyer begins to gradually colour this loose, rather imprecise sketch, he applies one coat of paint after the other onto the canvas, he allows the paint to dry and then puts on another layer of paint. Meyer's artworks have at least six layers of paint; and this gives them density and depth. It takes him three to six months to complete one work of art, and in between the different steps, he tears off the wet upper paint coat of the painting with a coating knife. Meyer lays violent hands on his material and the painted face, he struggles with the final version, he fights. One can see the injuries if one moves closer to the painting: the surface is roughened both horizontally and vertically, these are claw marks and injuries. In Meyer's works, even beautiful people are never simply attractive. The viewer's eyes do not glide along the surface of the face on the contrary. These paintings have a grip on you, you get caught, and you entangle yourself in the veil that seems to cover these pictures. You do not want to flirt with these persons; you rather want to ask them: What is the matter with you? Through a person's eyes you can look into his inner self, as they say, and Meyer counts on this reflex. Thus you can advance to what is the philosophical core; it is all about the image of the human being in the present times, a state description of human nature. When looking at Meyer's paintings for a longer time you get the impression that something eerie emanates from them. They are not a piece of decorative art. Meyer is a fisherman who catches his models with a scoop net from the digital data stream. These faces, however, do not have anything original. They are not natural, because they already were edited in studios and cutting rooms or edited in Photoshop. By showing on canvas what he has wrested from a stream of images, Meyer on his part manipulates the original and distorts it further. And he emphasises the act of painting through unnatural colours, blurring, softness of focus and scraper marks turning the new medium back into the old one. At the same time, he tries to get hold of the face to wrest it away from transience, to save it from the fate of blurring away into white noise. Meyer rescues, he preserves. The unease that besets the viewer is due to the fact that Meyer dares to break with old habits. Our usual strategies to approach the depicted persons are bound to fail. We cannot identify with them, we cannot touch their individuality, and we do not know whether they are yearning for something, whether they are hopeful or afraid, whether they are scared or whether they are craving something. Knowledge is recognition, as Plato says, and hence we are desperately searching through our memories for those faces. Yet, they begin to flicker when we move towards them, they are elusive. These pictures show frozen moments from elsewhere, they have their own reality. However, we sense that they can shed some light on our reality. Because one thing is for sure: Meyer's faces belong to our contemporaries. Taken together, they are an album with pictures of the present, a Face book in oil. Four years ago, Meyer began to show deformed faces. He took pictures of people in his immediate environment, his wife and daughter, for example, and then messed up their faces with adhesive tape; when he posed for himself, he put in false teeth. And what you see are grimacing faces. In his latest works, Meyer goes even further: he defaces originals from the web on his PC. With the mouse, he interferes with the structure of the faces; he destroys them without trying to distort them beyond recognition. There is now a hole in the cheek of a woman, another person's tip of the nose is no longer in the place where it belongs, and a lip is split. When he then paints these mutilated faces with vivid colours on canvas, their harshness is frightening. The brightness and colourfulness of his paintings is disrupted by distortions: something must have hit them, but it was not a fist. Such injuries occur when struggling with an abstract power, where resistance is impossible. These paintings are battlefield paintings for a digital world. Meyer’s new artworks are of utmost intensity. They make us puzzle over the conditions of the depicted persons. These persons look like ghosts. Meyer's human beings are transient, they seem homeless. On the other hand, through his manipulations Meyer brings us closer to the essence of human nature. The design elements of the original copies were removed from the faces. These faces have overcome the status of standardization. Meyer gives them individuality. He wrests the picture from the daily data stream and destroys what is designed in these faces. Thus he creates a new state of awareness. He has overcome something, which remains present as something that has in fact been overcome. We should not forget that the faces that Meyer paints once existed. The state in which they reached him, however, can at best be called lifeless; they were just vague imprints, cold data, estrangements. Meyer believes in the realness of the depicted person; with his technical and then mechanical manipulations he touches reality, he breaks up the surface. He knows that below the surface there is life. The fact that these portraits seem to be quite real in spite of their open artificiality makes the viewer ponder for a long time.   To reserve your place and register please email education@katara.net or call our Katara Education team on 4408 0233.