Wolfgang Mayer

Wolfgang Mayer is born in Kempten/Germany. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich/Germany , at Bar d´O in New York/USA and with Ron Clark at the Whitney ISP in New York. He works primarly with drawing, shimmering dust, video and performance. Since 2011 he has been professor for Body, Theory and Poetics of the Performative at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart/Germany.

Besides working on individual projects, together with Cristina Gómez Barrio he is part of the collaborative project Discoteca Flaming Star since 1998. Discoteca Flaming Star is an interdisciplinary collaborative art group which uses songs and other forms of oral expression, understanding them as a personal response to historical events and social and political facts. Through conceptual, visual and musical transfers, they create performances, sculptures, drawings, stages and situations whose foremost intention is to question and challenge the memory of the public, transforming old desires and finding invented pasts, or pasts which never occurred. They act directly in the gap between action and documentation, generating and finding documents that can be used to articulate strange tongues and languages that incite action and argument.

Their work has been shown at numerous venues including Artists Space, Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, NYC; MUMOK, Vienna/Austria; HKW, n.b.k., Basso, KW in Berlin, Ojo Atomico, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid, WHW, Zagreb, Tate Modern, London, De Appel, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam. Cristina Gómez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer have been the base of Discoteca Flaming Star since 1998.