RAIR | 2007

Enrique "Kike" Mayer | Argentina

Kike Mayer was born and raised in Bariloche, Patagonia Argentina, where he currently resides. He is a self-taught artist whose Surrealist paintings are brimming with color and unusual narratives. Over the past 30 years he has also developed techniques in mask making and has produced various series including: Zodiacs, Emotions, and Mythical. Kike has received many awards, including First Mention at the XXVI Drawing National Contest in Argentina, the 29th Annual Westmoreland Art Nationals award in Pennsylvania, and the Art Nexus Magazine Prize at the Vermont Studio Center Residency.

Enrique "Kike" (KEY-kay) Mayer is a self-taught artist who works with painting, sculpture, masks and puppets. Kike's work is driven by the realism of the environment and the people within that environment. He takes these impressions and stains them with chimerical, mythological, and dream-like interpretation. In this process of creating figurative images, there is an alien but recognizable moment when the sensibility of the finite begins to shift and move. When these margins begin to loosen, collaborative associations form. It is in this crude amalgam of variable images, that a metamorphosis takes place fusing the wild and real together. It is the process of amalgamation that inspires the quintessence of Kike's work.