Christoph Meier

Christoph Meier

Work from his oeuvre.

“While the situations staged by Christoph Meier are characterized by an abstract, geometrical formal vocabulary, the objects used appear to represent a plot. The emphasis here is on the performative and narrative potential of the media and presentation formats themselves.

For Christoph Meier, exhibitions are only a moment, an isolated presentation for the public, a time for discussion—something that comes to a head and then subsides again. His current exhibition in the Galerie was preceded by work he did at the Secession in November 2010. He has developed the layout of this previous show into a new exhibition situation, with parallel variations in a brochure and in the catalog. To describe this, Patrizia Dander uses the metaphor of an echo room.

Alongside the motifs of duplication, doubles, and repetition, copying is a central theme in Christoph Meier’s exhibition: the existence of the original and the copy, plus a copy of the copy, strongly suggest not only a plot, but also a system and a structure. This manifests itself on various levels:

For Meier, copying something is among the most important procedures of artistic creativity. “Copying something, mixing it with itself, duplicating it, is a very obvious, helpful way of altering an object; also as a way of freeing it and oneself if an impasse has been reached.” (Christoph Meier)

The copied objects are based on a set of plinths chosen, put together, and commented on for Christoph Meier by Francesco Stocchi. While the originals are often highly complex, Meier has reduced the models to the simplest of basic forms, in some cases only roughly recreated, so that new objects are developed. “Deliberately making errors when you copy, that’s the freedom or if you will the necessity to try something new. In this sense the source is nothing but a source, a reason to begin.” (Christoph Meier)

In the exhibition, Christoph Meier has also included a photocopier constantly producing a 16-page brochure with an essay by Francesco Stocchi and images of Meier’s sculptures. In this way, he integrates the copy as a print medium portraying the objects and the way they are handled. The photocopier is itself a plinth: “My main concern here is the feedback loop via the copier: a plinth that spits out further plinth objects.” (Christoph Meier)

For his objects, Christoph Meier realized the “most striking version” of the principle of copying. The first room in Meier’s show can be read as a spatial abstraction of the processes taking place inside a photocopying machine: stark lighting, a perforated metal plate that creates a grid, and a gray curtain recalling the hazy effect created by photocopiers on monochrome fields. The curtain and the metal plates, in which other light sources are reflected, are movable—like the light bar in a copier. And finally, the exhibition as a whole is reflected in a wall-filling mirror at the end of the long space.” – via secession