HARDING MEYER
Biography
Harding Meyer was born in 1964 in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. He grew up in Switzerland, Germany and France. From 1987 to 1993, he studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, then one of Germany’s most renowned academies of painting, where he laid the foundations for his artistic language.
Between photorealistic precision and pictorial abstraction, Harding Meyer places the human face at the heart of his approach. He does not represent a person or a character, but gives form to a powerful image, nourished by visual memory and cultural influences. Through the eyes, the mirror of the soul, he questions our relationship to image, identity and beauty. His canvases are distinguished by their scale, the materiality of their surface and the subtle tension they create between proximity and distance.
For Harding Meyer, painting does not mean reproducing, but transforming. Each work retains traces of the gesture, affirming that no image is ever fixed. His portraits are the result of patient work, layer upon layer, where extreme precision and unexpected breaks coexist. The canvas is not only a result, but the memory of its own process. In a visually saturated world, in the age of filters and algorithmic optimisation, the artist chooses slowness. His faces, far from smooth perfection, reveal rough edges. They become mysterious, open pictorial spaces, where imperfection itself gives rise to emotion.
