CHRISTIAN MEGERT

In his search for new pictorial forms, Christian Megert experimented from the mid-1950s onwards with painterly sculptural practices, using relief-like forms, lines and grids to create structural reflexes of the incoming light on bright colour surfaces. Consequently, Megert increasingly detached from this painterly approach and by the end of the 1950s was already developing pioneering ideas for the expansion of the inner pictorial space with the help of broken light through directly reflecting surfaces.

Since 1960 onwards, the mirror, as an industrially produced material (Readymade), is Megert’s means of choice for doubling, changing, refracting and multiplying forms in order to generate the idea of a new space that could reach into infinity. As a companion of Lucio Fontana, with whom he met in Paris in the 1950s along with Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein, Christian Megert is the first artist who, with this consistency, sought to expand the traditional pictorial space into the 3rd dimension by means of light refraction and mirror effects. His mirror manifesto Ein Neuer Raum from 1961 is furthermore an appeal with the ‘help of art to rethink everything possible’.