Nanne Meyer

Nanne Meyer (born 12 April 1953 in Hamburg), is a German artist.

She is one of the first women artists of the postwar generation who works primarily in drawing.

Meyer lives and works in Berlin.

Already during her studies, in the 1970s, Meyer placed an emphasis on working in the drawing medium, seeking out connections to the activities of thinking and writing.

In making small-format booklets as well as extensive series of drawings she investigates forms of interplay between language and image.

Emerging from the gestures of writing and from an associative understanding of forms, Meyer developed the "Wandlung" series of large format graphite drawings, for which she first became recognized.

The German term "Wandlung" or "Transformation", represents a principle of the process-based, the transformative, the fleeting, the unstable, which recurs throughout Meyer's body of work.

These are generally divided into thematically linked work-groups made up of small-format series, large-format drawings, as well as artist books and pamphlets.

Meyer was born in Hamburg and studied from 1974 to 1981 at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg with Gerhard Rühm and Tomas Schmit.

After completing the I. Staatsexam, in 1982 she was awarded a DAAD Stipend in London, where she studied animation at the Saint Martins School of Art.

1984 1989 1990 1991 1992 1999 1997 1998 1999 2000 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2008 2014

In 1986–87 she was awarded the German Rome Prize, a one-year stipend at the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo, after which she lived in Frankfurt/Main for several years.

Since 1986, a central aspect of Nanne Meyer's work has been the making of yearbooks.

They contain her archive, document her changing drawing repertoire, her range of forms, reflections from the everyday and key drawings for development in following series of work.

To date 24 books with ca. 8500 drawings have been made.

1992 1994 1996 1997 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2009 2010

In 1993 she moved to Berlin, where since 1994 she teaches as professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee.

Yearbook 16 (September 2000 – March 2002) was published in facsimile in 2003 with support of the Kunstfonds Bonn (Gimlet Verlag Köln).

Taking as point of departure the fleeting and metaphoric aspect of clouds and the views out of airplane windows, since 2000 Meyer has been investigating specific aspects of perceptual/spatial experiences.

In the works titled "Papierperspektive" ("Paper Perspectives"), various simultaneous points of view and the abstraction of seeing are formulated by means of lines and superimposed with graphic conventions drawn from meteorology and cartography.

Emergent are dynamic, floating spaces with multiple perspectives which do not allow the gaze to come to rest.

For the artist these drawings are both perceptual reflections of space as well as "thinking conduits".

Nanne Meyer's work, including further images not included in this article, is documented on the artist's.

In 2013 she received the women artists' prize NRW for drawing and in 2014 the Hannah-Höch Preis in Berlin.

Nanne Meyer's artwork is directly linked to her own personal process of seeing, experiencing and reflecting upon the world, mediated through an experimental sensibility.