Eric Meier at fffriedrich / Frankfurt am Main

Eric Meier
Don’t worry, there will be more problems.


Curated by  Malina Lauterbach & Dierk Höhne


 21.2.-7.3.2020


fffriedrich, Alte Mainzer Gasse 4-6
Frankfurt am Main









Dialogue between
the artist Eric Meier and the curators Malina Lauterbach and Dierk Höhne
ML/DH You
were born in East Berlin in 1989 and grew up in Frankfurt (Oder). What
significance does your biography have for the investigation of supposedly
‘typical‘ East German sensitivities?


EM My biography is
clearly the starting point for my sensitivity in dealing with this topic.
My work is derived from that. Family experiences, the environment of an East
German small town, the current political situation and how to deal with it, to
name just a few points. All of that is reflected in it.

I understand my
photographic work as a search for the metaphorical potential of images. But I
never start thinking, I still need this or that. It comes to me. The slightly
ruinous and worn out attracts me. Social criticism is, I believe, inherent in
the places themselves, which remain anonymous, fragmented and fragmentary. In
the context of the exhibition, lines, correlations and reading directions are
certainly of a political nature, too. Another approach is that of archiving.
The (building) material in public space is disappearing. At the same time, the
pictures speak of the past and the present alike. It is not about reality or
truth. It’s about my identity, which is shaped by such an environment that is
still part of a collective East German identity even after 30 years.

If so, then the
irony for me is in the ‘typical’ German gesture of ‘Verschlimmbesserung’
(improving things for the worse). The dedication of each garage owner to design
his / her gate. Also in the ‘German Angst’ as described by psychology: an
unexplained, apparently obvious fear of loss of property, which is reflected in
the appearance of the gates. “THOR” also means ‘Thor Steinar’, the widespread
neo-Nazi clothing company from Königs Wusterhausen, and at the same time refers
to the abuse of Germanic mythology by the Nazis, which perverted them as
‘primordial German high culture’. In the mythological moment there is also an
unexplained ‘behind’. The awareness that the NSU used such garages to build
bombs.

Where
photography ends, spatial work begins: sculpture, object, text, etc. I find
this interaction very appealing. To quote from a place or an environment with
pictures and to carry this mood further into the room in which the depicted
material appears physically deformed or fragmented. I then understand the
exhibition like a cosmos or a setting.

For me, the
materials create different levels of meaning. Concrete e.g. is an architectural
reference, a cheap material, a display for an urban situation. I use collected
schnapps bottles for the glass work. Through fragmentation and melting they
lose their original shape and practically dissolve. This results in new
consistencies
.
(Translation: Klaus-R. Voss)