Meyer’s technical precision and conceptual intuition are rooted in a first-class education. Born in Göttingen in 1969, he studied at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There, he became a master student (Meisterschüler) under Gerhard Richter, one of the most influential artists of the present day. He also spent a formative year as a visiting student at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.

Richter’s influence is evident not so much in a direct stylistic copy, but rather in Meyer’s deep understanding of the properties of paint and the interplay with blurriness. However, Meyer has found a path entirely his own: while Richter often uses photography as a starting point to question painting, Meyer uses painting to capture nature in a state of pure atmosphere.

The secret behind the luminosity and depth of his underwater paintings lies in a highly complex painting process. Meyer uses heavily diluted oil paints, which he applies to the canvas in translucent glazes. He often allows the paint to flow in a controlled manner, creating vertical structures that resemble rays of light or water currents.

This process requires maximum concentration: the paint must have exactly the right viscosity to form those characteristic streaks and transparencies that lead the viewer to believe they are actually looking through meters of deep, clear water. It is a painting of layering, where the light does not seem to fall onto the image from the outside but radiates from the depths of the canvas itself.

In his underwater views, Matthias Meyer breaks with conventional perspective. Often, the viewer looks up from the depths to where the sunlight transforms the water’s surface into a glistening web of reflections. Elsewhere, the eye loses itself in dense carpets of aquatic plants or in the infinite expanse of blue water.

These images evoke a physical reaction: one seems to feel the silence and the pressure of the deep. Here, water functions as a space of deceleration. It is a place beyond the noise of everyday life, a place of contemplation and the subconscious. Meyer achieves the paradox of capturing the enormous dynamics of flowing water in a moment of absolute stillness.

Meyer’s painting is a permanent oscillation between two poles. If one moves close to the canvas, the motif dissolves completely. One sees drip marks, fine edges of paint, and abstract gradients—the pure materiality of the paint. However, if one steps back, the human eye immediately reassembles the fragments into a hyper-realistic experience of nature.

This tension makes his works timeless. They are an homage to the beauty of nature, yet they reject kitsch through their uncompromising painterly radicalism. Matthias Meyer does not simply show us water; he shows us the way we see, feel, and lose ourselves in the infinity of space.