In Search of the Mundane with Marlène Meyer-Dunker
For the past year, German artist Marlène Meyer-Dunker has been exploring German suburbia with a keen eye for a certain type of beauty; one which is disguised in the banal. Born in 1979 to a Spanish mother and German father in Hamburg, Meyer-Dunker has pursued a career in the arts and comes from a background in theatre and painting. After craving a fresh mode of creative expression, she recently transferred her attention to photography and has been passionate about the craft ever since.
“I have always painted, until last year when I borrowed a camera from a friend of mine and immediately fell in love with photography. Painting was about interiority, the inside, while taking photos changed my relationship to the outside. For example, it has transformed my outlook on what I used to think of as an “ugly” environment. In the past i could hardly stand German suburbia, now i seek out these places and imagine the stories happening behind the walls and windows… it touches me in an ambivalent way.”
Camera in hand, Marlène documents ambivalence everywhere; in looking for beauty in abstraction, in the unobtrusive, the boring, and the everyday. In finding transience and sadness of all beauty. In our human determination to identify beauty in nature, which can always be nothing but a construct of our minds. In our helpless – because; finite – and therefore touching efforts to survive.
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