ARTIST COLLECTIVE

As an artist collective we deal with questions of deconstruction, connection and recomposition of photographic processes; mindfully we probe possibilities of the medium and weave different materials, techniques and theories into hybrids. We understand photography as a dynamic language, enter into a common dialogue, a constant exchange with each other, with our environment and the space/place as a basis. 

Maria Bayer (*1989 in Memmingen) studied photography at the TH Nuremberg from 2010 to 2014. During her studies she assisted Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur in London and co-curated her gallery. Her clients include Spiegel, Fluter, ZEIT, Focus and Deutsche Telekom.

Maria's photography is fast, cropped, partly abstract. She works journalistically, commercially and artistically, allowing the three disciplines to correspond with each other. Artistically, she is interested in the intangible, the disappearing, the proximity. Here she sees photography as a way of sketching, she strives for a fragmentary result. Currently she is photographically dealing with the subject of air; she photographs clouds and fog, the blueness in the distance, cold and warmth.

Rebecca Schwarzmeier (*1991 in Munich) studied photography at the TH Nuremberg from 2011 to 2015 and has been studying in the photography class at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg since 2016, first with Prof. Juergen Teller, and since 2019 with Prof. Katja Eydel.

Meanwhile, she worked in Ryan McGinley's studio in New York City and with Olaf Unverzart in Munich, among others. She participates in group exhibitions throughout Germany (e.g. "Real Fake" at Frappant Gallery Hamburg, "To Be An Angular Something As A Round Nothing" at Kaulbach1 Munich). Her work is represented in collections such as Sparkasse Nuremberg, Merkurbank Munich, and the Israeli Embassy in Munich.

Rebecca works with a variety of media, primarily analog photographic techniques, but also spatial installations and video, to make questions experiential and create a dialogue between inner sensibility and the external world.

Authenticity, purpose, role, longings, and unfulfillable promises are among her central themes; in doing so, she looks at human-shaped and built landscapes as well as interpersonal relationships, taking personal observations and the examination of existing theories as her starting point.

Meike Männel (*1991 in Nuremberg) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 2013 to 2016. First graphic design and visual communication with Prof. Holger Felten and Prof. Friederike Girst, later free art with a focus on photography with Prof. Juergen Teller, who appointed her master student in 2017. 

Since 2019 she has been working in her studio in Großreuth and participates in numerous exhibitions throughout Germany (e.g. "Punctum - Birner and Wittmann Collection" at Neues Museum Nürnberg, "You're just too good to be true" at CFA Gallery Berlin, "Kunst im Alten Ministergang" Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst Munich). 

Her images are represented in collections such as the New Museum Nuremberg, Sparkasse Nuremberg, Merkurbank Munich and the Birner and Wittmann Collection. In 2021 she was awarded the German Photography Book Prize in Silver, for her newly published artist book "Good Life". 

Meike is concerned with her immediate surroundings and the special in the everyday. Her main media are photography, risography and silkscreen. She wants to explore and redefine the boundaries of these techniques. Photographs serve as a basis for her work; these are reworked, destroyed, and reassembled in analog and digital collages. Photo installations and objects are created, as well as connections between photography and painting.