Mike Meiré: Archaeology of Now

10 Oct-31 Oct 2025

Overview

Bartha Contemporary is pleased to announce Archaeology of Now, a solo exhibition of new works by German artist and art director Mike Meiré, presenting a focused suite from Meiré’s ongoing Eternal News Series.

Meiré, celebrated for his ability to transform everyday objects into compelling works of art, here turns his attention to one of the most transient of all cultural artefacts — the daily newspaper. In the Eternal News Series, newspapers are cast in bronze, nickel silver, and other alloys, each page preserved in a process that transfigures the fragile into the enduring. Creases, folds, and torn edges are fossilised in gleaming relief, transforming once-disposable sheets into monumental, precious objects.

The newspaper is the ultimate symbol of immediacy — fragile, disposable, and quickly replaced by the next edition. In Archaeology of Now, these fleeting carriers of information are fossilised in bronze and transformed into enduring relics. Their surfaces are torn, punctured, and worn, bearing the scars of handling and abuse. They appear as if excavated from a future ruin: fragments of our present moment, suspended between monument and decay.

By translating ephemeral media into lasting material, the works ask what of today will remain tomorrow. They expose the paradox of our information culture — headlines consumed and forgotten within hours, yet cast here as indestructible memory. The viewer becomes an archaeologist of the contemporary, deciphering traces of urgency, crisis, and collective obsession embedded in these artefacts. Archaeology of Now thus reflects on the instability of the present, turning the fleeting into the eternal, the disposable into the monumental.

For collectors, these works offer a rare convergence of conceptual rigour and material presence. Each relief is unique — a one-of-a-kind transformation of a specific news page into metal. Their surfaces, alternately mirror-bright or patinated, invite close inspection and speak to a long sculptural tradition of bronze casting while engaging directly with the concerns of contemporary art.

Meiré’s practice sits in dialogue with artists such as John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, and Wade Guyton, all of whom interrogate the visual languages of media and the archive. His work has been widely exhibited across Europe, and this new presentation at Bartha Contemporary offers collectors and audiences alike the opportunity to encounter a timely, resonant body of work that bridges the urgency of the now with the permanence of sculpture.

Archaeology of Now positions Meiré’s latest Eternal News works as both monuments to the ephemeral and as invitations to reflect on how history is written in material form.