Artworks of the Düsseldorf-based portraitist Harding Meyer are inseparably connected with the media era. Each piece is based on the image that the artist found on pages of magazines and catalogs, in TV shows and movies, or on the Internet. Transferring these images onto canvases, Meyer leaves only the models’ faces and then adds original glitch effects to the images so that they look doubled, blurred and smudged at certain points, or remind a compressed digital image with its mosaic effect. As a result, the paintings look like being edited in a graphic software.
Meyer’s portraits are very personal and expressive. Isolating the models’ faces from their context, the artist gives back the characters their individuality. Especially, Meyer gives focus on the eyes – on the most paintings, the models intently look on a viewer. And together with the large format of the paintings, this creates a special effect of closeness and intimacy.
