Notes

Walter Meyer is best known for his realist paintings of rural South Africa, light-infused mood pieces that formed the bedrock of his output from the early 1990s until his death in 2017. He arrived at this mature style after experimenting with versions of surrealism, photorealism and – as is vividly evidenced in these three lots – neo-expressionism. Characterised by its raw, spontaneous and subjective handling of colours, materials and subjects, preference for symbols and atavistic themes, neo-expressionist painting sponsored a major revival of painting globally in the 1980s. Meyer’s interest in the movement emerged while studying painting at the University of Pretoria in the mid-1980s.

Further primed by a romantic relationship with a German woman he had met in Pretoria, Meyer travelled to Germany with the aim of studying at the prestigious Düsseldorf Academy. After an aimless few months, he telephoned Joseph Beuys, a former professor at the Academy, after finding his number in a directory. The unsolicited call led to an interview with the Academy’s professors, among them painter Gerhard Richter. ‘All I had on me was a little pathetic black sketchbook with sketches and scribblings,’ recalled Meyer in 2010. ‘I had sent my portfolio to the Academy beforehand, but when I had called the secretary, she didn’t know anything about it.’ Meyer showed Richter his single sketchbook. ‘He was unimpressed and just shook his head.’

Unbeknownst to Meyer, he had already been accepted into the Academy before his disastrous interview with Richter. Unable to speak German, he initially struggled with his studies. ‘The first year especially was terrible,’ said Meyer. ‘I couldn’t communicate. In class they would have these lengthy discussions, and I’d just sit there not knowing what they’re talking about. I felt stupid. Luckily Michael Buthe had just started at the academy. He was quite well known in Germany at the time but died quite young.’ A prolific and experimental artist, as well as being an occultist, hippie, gay and Catholic, Buthe’s now-celebrated output encompasses textile works, drawings, paintings, photographs, collages, diaries and assemblage sculptures. But for Meyer’s ecstatic visual diaries from the late 1980s, gorgeous artefacts that reveal his full immersion in the neo-expressionist moment, Buthe appears to have been a benign influence. Meyer’s work from his German period (1985-88) shows greater kinship with the primitivist figuration of A.R. Penck and gestural abstraction of Albert Oehlen, two important neo-expressionists of the time. There is even a sense that Meyer was working through the influence – consciously or not – of another Pretoria artist, Walter Battiss, particularly the gentle anarchist’s fauvist-inspired neo-primitive paintings of the 1960s. Derided by critics as unskilled, apolitical, a blasé market commodity, neo-expressionism nonetheless endures. Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the movement’s most controversial stars, is now a canonical figure. Meyer’s works from this formative period in his career merits serious consideration. Like Battiss, Meyer was an accomplished draughtsman. What can appear as naïve and instinctive in his canvases in fact drew from a wellspring of formal composition. This is clear from Meyer’s complex line drawings included in the exhibition for the 1988 Standard Bank National Drawing Competition. At the time, Meyer was intent on crowding his compositions with simplified figures, cryptic symbols and bold patterns. The journey from conté to oil was transformative. Meyer’s handling of paint, while confident, is ultimately spirited and gestural, and his use of colour far earthier than in the pop-surrealist landscapes that followed. ‘I was just experimenting most of the time,’ said Meyer of this exploratory phase in his career. ‘I didn’t know what to do, and then I came across Edward Hopper.’ His subsequent painting would shift dramatically in style and mood.

* All quotes from Sean O’Toole (2010) ‘From Pretoria to Upington, via Düsseldorf and Bethulie,’ Art South Africa, Vol. 8.3. Pages 64–69.