Bringing Home the Pictures  

Corinna Mayer has given her small series of images a poetic, even romantic title, 'Heimreise in die Fremde' (Coming Home Away), and a sub-title that reflects on and perhaps also clarifies the foreign, 'Wenn das Bekannte fremd wird und das Fremde nicht mehr fremd ist' (When the known becomes alien and the alien is no longer strange). She speaks thus on the one hand about experience, alienation (in her life) and on the other, about the possibilities of a world of images that superficially have no connection with her life. In the first place, she privately collects photographs; we shall describe it as a coming closer to oneself through metamorphosis. Photographs are the ideal material for an appropriation into drawing, into a colourful image and into almost life-size frescoes because of the medium's guaranteed closeness to reality. Corinna Mayer imprints her role models not only with her unmistakable style; her figures resemble each other and possibly also the artist. The process of appropriation: one should start here on the one hand with Roland Barth's theory that speaks of the experience of the 'punktum', of that moment of fascination in strange images when our fantasy takes possession of the image, and on the other, it should be recognised that this act of appropriation is an important strategic element for many contemporary artists. Andy Warhol is the best example of an artist using public images as documents for a medial transformation. Corinna Mayer privatises the images that she comes into contact with, some of which are presented on the back cover of this catalogue. The viewer may succeed in equating motifs when he can align, just as an example, a couple rising from a kind of calyx, his eyes open, hers closed, with a postcard of two Hollywood stars. The Scheid Collection of erotic nudes as well as pictures from Diane Arbus to Wilhelm von Gloeden were a treasure trove for the artist. Representations of women dominate, but conditions of togetherness also fascinate her. Starting with a classical Adam and Eve paraphrase, Corinna Mayer simulates almost encyclopaedically numerous possibilities of togetherness (as happiness?); from identical twins to a Chagall paraphrase of a flying pair of lovers, from a mother-child connection to human-animal combinations, from socially competent duos to transgressive images of mutual lust. The figures, when they appear alone, are often placed in an objective, silhouette-like frame that cuts out the figure from the background; it could be similar alignments of flower forms with a breast, or a boat from which the figure steps, a mixture of goblet and balloon or a kind of handbag that can carry a female nude. One does not need to be familiar with the sources that the artist uses, it is enough to register the sequence of themes, the process of change, also when her palette plunges from the black and white of the drawings into a surreal red and blue light (apparently her favourite colours). Although Corinna Mayer monopolises strange images like a vampire, these altered motifs move one, they exude unrest, however restful they pretend to be. They document an emotional passion driven by a desire for closeness in their producer. An American friend paraphrased the drawings when he saw them for the first time with the English term, 'intriguing'. No other term can better characterise them than this. Peter Weiermair