Sculpture gallery
To the sculptures
In my early years I discovered my affection for the African and Creole sculpture. I was completely seduced, fascinated of their aesthetics. It was, as if a door gets open to another world. A world full of colors, lives, spirit and tradition. The freedom of their creativity, the excess of their fantasy captivated and inspired me. For me these sensuous proportions, this breathtaking emanation are everything else then primitive folk art. This is big class, unsophisticated, honest in the interpretation as well as in the materials. The African art became for my own artistic work a large model with constant value.
Sculpture gallery
African Figures
The artist René Mayer is irresistibly drawn to African figures. He interprets the use of forms of indigenous peoples in new and surprising ways. African figures were already a major source of artistic inspiration at the beginning of the 20th century and played an important part in the creation of Cubism. They informed avant-garde works by Braque, Modigliani, and Picasso, whose paintings and sculptures of women are unmistakably influenced by African figures. “It is the feeling for forms and materials as well as the imperfect spontaneousness that lends African art its admirable harmony and expressiveness”, says the artist. “Man, woman, and harmonious encounters are the foundation of my sculptures.”
Sculpture gallery
Viva Viva
The cheerfulness of these sculptures is infectious. “When I created them, I was in a colour-craze. I painted the fired terracotta figures in an almost euphoric tempo. I’ve no idea what drove me”, remembers René Mayer. This is how Viva Viva came to be so spontaneously out of the basic, raw terracotta forms. With its colour, the fun-loving series expresses the lightness and also elegant cosmopolitanism. “For the figures, I was inspired by flotsam, the stone or wooden forms washed up on the riverbanks by the waves. Then the naked terracotta figures called out – it was a real call for help – for positive colour. A Mexican exhibition on old sculptures provided me with the initial impulse; one colour blending into the next, everything in flux and the burst of colour just exploded. Viva Viva stimulates a positive mindset and the yearning for sunny travels.”
