Charlotte Mayer

Charlotte Mayer was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1929, and moved to England at the age of 10, on the eve of World War II. Mayer studied at Goldsmiths College, London, before enrolling at the Royal College of Art between 1949 and 1952, by then a melting pot of post-war cultural and artistic development.

Mayer’s career is perhaps a lifelong exploration of the nature of duality: aspects that she witnesses in the human condition as well as the natural world. Her sculpture, their fluent structures and repeated forms, give way to remarkably organic forms that express a very personal understanding of space and movement. Overall, it is this movement; billowing forms, constricting and unfurling planes, and rising sentinels that create a dynamic dialogue.

A wealth of materials form Mayer’s practice: steel, plaster, wax, cardboard, balsa scantlings, tree bark and leaves all underline the collaboration of natural and animated form. Many of these materials, found in the studio or countryside, are cast into bronze and patinated to create an enriching ambiguity.

Over the course of her five-decade career, Mayer has completed numerous major public commissions, including Sea Circle, 1984 located at Copperas Hill, Liverpool; Ascent, 1991 at the Barbican Centre, London – which won the Royal Society of British Sculptors Silver Medal; and Wind & Fire, for BNP Paribas, London. She has exhibited extensively across the UK, where her work is held in corporate and private collections internationally.