The Architecture of Line and Color
Munich, 1959. The Academy of Fine Arts is the starting point for a practice defined by the tension between structure and spontaneity. Manfred Mayerle studies under Josef Oberberger, Hermann Kaspar, and Anton Marxmüller, absorbing the foundations of form before the impulse to break them takes hold. By 1970, the focus shifts from the academic to the freelance life, split between the urban energy of Munich and the light of Mallorca. He becomes part of the 68er-Bewegung, a movement driven by the desire to change society through art, though he often finds himself critiquing a world that favors branding and triviality over the struggle for quality.
His process is a physical confrontation with the medium. He does not merely apply paint; he pours, brushes, and rolls massive quantities of pigment. A hybrid tool, the Pinselfüller—part brush, part fountain pen—allows him to bridge the gap between the fluid wash of a painting and the precise, obsessive repetition of a line. This tool turns a simple sheet of hotel paper or a discarded cardboard box into a site of intense graphic investigation. In his Out of the Box series, the very material of packaging becomes a canvas for complex, woven grids and interlocking structures.
Scale and Spatial Resonance
The work moves from the intimate to the monumental, occupying spaces that demand a different kind of perception. In the entrance hall of the Siemens headquarters in Erlangen, a painting stretching 12.6 by 6 meters forces the viewer to confront scale. Such large-scale commissions define his relationship with architecture. He has occupied a 250-meter corridor in Fürstenfeldbruck and the auditorium maximum of a technical college in Nuremberg, where four massive rectangles, each roughly 16 meters long and 4 meters high, meet the viewer. These works are not static decorations; they are visual resonators.
In these large environments, color takes on a weight of its own. In the Nuremberg auditorium, layers of blue culminate in a depth that mimics a water surface, occasionally modulated by warm red tones. The verticality of the paint, applied through pouring and brushing, mimics the upright posture of the human figure. The paint does not seek a quick effect. Instead, it aims for a sense of duration, a continuous flow of color that connects the viewer to the physical reality of the room.
The Search for the Essential
The evolution of his style marks a departure from his early training in figurative portraiture. While he once won prizes for his ability to capture the likeness of a subject, his later work finds the subject within the color and the line themselves. The geometry of his paintings often reveals itself as something more complex upon closer inspection, a deceptive simplicity that hides a deep, layered history of application. He seeks the transcendent through the concrete, using the physical properties of pigment to reach for something more permanent.
His studio in Establiments, Mallorca, acts as a sanctuary for this ongoing investigation. It is here that the light of the island informs his eye, providing a "gas station" for his creative energy. Whether working on a small ink drawing or a massive mural, the objective remains the same: to allow the color to find its own path downward, creating a dialogue between the artist's hand and the gravity of the medium.
