With Mach Mehr Mennige, Meyer Riegger presents its first exhibition with exclusively historical works by Meuser from the 1980s and 1990s. On display are sculptures, wall pieces and works on paper, including the artist’s lottery drawings. This extensive exhibition was developed in close collaboration with Galerie Bärbel Grässlin. Parallel to the show at Meyer Riegger in Karlsruhe, this Frankfurt gallery presents Meuser’s more recent and current works under the title Red kein Blech from 13 January to 17 February 2024. Both exhibitions trace how Meuser has continued to refine his unique oeuvre from the 1970s to the present; navigating the tensions between constructivism, readymade and minimal art, his work dispels the gravity of the pathos of modernism with profound irony and remains relevant to this day.

The year in which Meuser began studying under Joseph Beuys and later Erwin Heerich – 1968 – marked the beginning of the student protests. Political discussions dominated the atmosphere at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where Meuser, who later became a long-standing professor at the academy in Karlsruhe, also attended seminars on philosophy and art education. It was in this charged environment, with the encouragement of his friend Imi Knoebel, that Meuser attempted to work with what was already there and began his regular forays into the scrapyard. “Out of necessity”, as he says. The rattling of endless freight trains, enormous bridges made out of steel girders and vast blast furnaces were already part of his everyday life as a child in the Ruhr area. Born in Essen in 1947 and raised between the ruins of the war and the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), his father, an engineer, often brought him along on his tours of industrial firms.

Since his first scavenger hunt in a Düsseldorf scrapyard in the 1970s, Meuser has cultivated an abstract, constructivist formal language based on the heavy and bulky materials of iron and steel. With often only minimal intervention, he transforms sheet metal, ventilation shafts, T-beams, wheelbarrows and other everyday objects into sculptures. Many of his works are strongly pictorial in nature and seek proximity to a wall. For this reason, the art historian Bernhard Bürgi refers to them as “three-dimensional realities” or “image-like constellations” rather than sculptures. Meuser himself is not interested in such complicated technical terms; he prefers to describe some of his works as “walls” (“Wandungen”). Language is a central element in Meuser’s oeuvre. While his early works were mostly untitled, at some point the artist realised “that life is funnier if you immerse yourself in it on a textual level, too”. Since then, he has come up with whimsical, occasionally funny or provocative titles for each work. Meuser’s works are therefore not only characterised by the tension between their sculptural structure and pictorial nature, but also by the tension between language and object. In a conversation with fellow artist Franz Ackermann, Meuser once said that if you ever took off in the Ruhr area, you were immediately brought back down to earth – and by language in its most banal form. Meuser follows the same pattern with the titles of his works: first he elevates the scrap metal to a work of art, only to then use language to bring it back down to earth, to everyday banality.

The material that Meuser finds on the scrap heap is cut, welded, compressed, folded, combined and often painted with anti-rust or oil-based paint. The paint brings a third element into the equation, because the direct application of the anti-rust paint – if it is not already present on the found object anyway – acts more like a kind of coating, an extra layer on the material, its sculptural aspect outweighing its painterly one. One type of anti-rust paint that Meuser used for years due to its bright orange shade is the red lead that gives the exhibition its title. The pigment is toxic, which is why its industrial production has been banned in Germany since 2012. It is still available for restoration purposes. In contrast to the oxidised surfaces of untreated metal, red lead has a particularly intense appearance, as does anti-rust paint in other shades such as grey, reddish brown and yellow ochre. Over the years, Meuser’s colour palette has become more subtle, beginning with the addition of indigo blue, yellowish green and vermilion. For the undulations and folds of the sheet metal in his more recent and current works, which are on display at Bärbel Grässlin, Meuser used powdery pastel shades ranging from pink and eggshell white to Naples yellow and beige.

Despite the heaviness of the material and its frequently sharp edges, Meuser’s works appear light. Although it requires a great deal of force to reshape iron and steel, Meuser’s works seem less like they have been distorted or violently forced into a new form, and more like their appearance has been altered, curved and folded with patience and care. Upon closer inspection, holes, fissures and organic structures are sometimes visible. The hardness of the material is secondary to its optical softness. Meuser’s works are distinguished by their sincerity, their humanity. He folds and turns the inside of the material outwards.

Text: Alicja Schindler