Nanne Meyer

Nanne Meyer was born in Hamburg and received her artistic training there at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. Following her MFA, she held several fellowships, which allowed her to study in 1982-83 in London at the St. Martin‘s School of Art, in 1986 to spend a year in Rome at the Villa Massimo, and in 1996 to work at the Djerassi Artist Foundation in Woodside, California. Since 1994 she has been Professor of Drawing at the art academy in Berlin-Weissensee. She lives in Berlin.

Nanne Meyer’s work in the medium of drawing is known from numerous exhibition catalogues and published artist’s books, such as the retrospective entitled „Zeichnung" (Drawing, 1995) and „Luftblicke" (Glances in the Air), a facsimile edition of one of her numerous books of drawings, published in Cologne in 2003.

Since 1981 she has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, primarily in Germany and Switzerland. Some of her most important solo shows were held in1989 in the Kunsthalle Nuremberg, 1997 in the National Gallery in Bonn, 1998 in the Lenbachhaus museum in Munich and 1999 in the Kunsthalle in Winterthur, Switzerland.

Meyer’s work is found in many public and private collections, such as the National Gallery in Berlin, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, the National Gallery in Bonn, the Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg, the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt, the National Gallery of Germany and the corporate collection of the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.

On Meyer’s work:

Ever since she was an art student in the late 1970s, she has worked primarily in the medium of drawing, exploring the areas of meaning between words and images, the potential uses of line, and also the representation of space without the use of perspective. Of central importance in her work is the process of drawing. Since her work evolves sequentially, serial production has become a basic method of working.

In 1986 while in Rome Nanne Meyer began consistently drawing in bound books of blank paper. She takes these books along everywhere and later uses the drawings in them as the raw material for further projects. She considers them her personal archive. They contain observations and Drawings made during extensive trips to Mesoamerica, South East Asia, Japan, India and Indonesia. These books of drawings have taken on a central role in Meyer’s work and now number sixteen volumes containing about 5500 drawings.