MeuserGermany

Meuser (b. 1947 in Essen, DE) is a former student of Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1970s, and a frequent collaborator of Martin Kippenberger in the 1980s. He creates art that sits on the edge of sculpture, painting, and installation. His works are often considered a reevaluation of the material waste left by industrialisation, particularly in his native Germany.

Meuser incorporates found objects, mostly iron and steel elements, into autonomous sculptures and material assemblages. Initially machine-made objects, which he finds in already altered form mainly in the scrap yard, are further deformed, welded together, sometimes painted over, and combined into abstract entities. Already the search for such relics of industry and the selection of compatible fragments form an essential aspect of his working process.

Through their humorous and at the same time pointed titles, Meuser’s works also receive narrative and representational ascriptions. In a similar way to the found and assembled scraps, the titles of the works are also findings – scraps of words and parts of sentences that are torn from their original context and recycled. In connection with the respective works, new fields of association and contexts of meaning are thus opened up, which situate Meuser’s works in a field of tension between banality and poetry.

Meuser lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he served as a professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts from 1992-2015. His work has been exhibited in major institutions such as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2023), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami (2022), and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (2021), and at the documenta IX in Kassel (1992). His work is part of esteemed collections including the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Margulies Collection in Miami. He was awarded the Kunstpreis Böttcherstraße in Bremen (1985) and the ars viva prize for “Shaped Spaces” from the German Business Circle (1991/92).