Charlotte Mayer

Charlotte Mayer (4 January 1929 – 9 November 2022) was a Czech-born British sculptor.

Early life and education Mayer was born in Prague, the only child of Kurt Fanta and Helen Marie Stutzová. Kurt and Helen divorced in 1937, and two years later Helen married Ludwig “Frederick” Mayer. In 1939, aged 10, Mayer and her mother emigrated to the United Kingdom to flee the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Despite pleas from Helen, Mayer’s maternal grandparents, Růžena and Eduard Stutz, chose not to accompany their daughter and granddaughter to the UK, and remained in Prague. In 1942, Růžena was transported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and subsequently to the Treblinka extermination camp, where she was murdered. In a televised interview, Mayer stated that Růžena and Eduard were “the most important people” in her life.

In 1945, Mayer studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, under the tutelage of Edward Folkard, Harold Wilson Parker and Ivor Roberts-Jones. She continued her studies at the Royal College of Art, enrolling in 1950. Her tutors at this time included Frank Dobson, John Skeaping and Heinz Henghes. While at the RCA, Mayer met her future husband, the architect Geoffrey Salmon. They married in 1952.

Work

Mayer received her first public commission in 1953: Mother and Child, a carved alabaster piece for the maternity ward of Epsom General Hospital. The sculpture, however, was criticised as being “too modern”, and never put on display.

Following a twelve-year hiatus to focus on raising her three children, Mayer returned to sculpture in the mid-1960s. Initially producing human figures, a visit to New York City in 1967 inspired a series of timber – and later steel – sculptures entitled Black Cities. Mayer’s fascination with modern cities continued into the 1970s, and the ring-like forms of Source, Cascade, Flow and Nebula stem from her observations of smoke rising from Battersea Power Station.

Mayer also began periodically producing animal sculptures throughout the next few decades. In 1979, a commission from Johnson & Johnson for a new office headquarters in Slough led to the creation of Caring Hands.

In the early 1980s, Mayer began to work with the Pangolin Editions foundry. This collaboration led to bronze, silver and steel castings of her subsequent sculptures.

Mayer’s interest in spiral forms permeates her work. In 1984, three years after the Toxteth riots, Sea Circle was installed in central Liverpool. The 240cm high ammonite-inspired bronze sculpture followed smaller whorled table and wall pieces, Voyager (1994), and Journey, now situated on the University of Northampton’s campus.

Further major commissions during the 1990s and 2000s included Ascent (1991) for London’s Barbican Estate, Tree of Life (1992) for the North London Hospice, Wind & Fire (1997) for BNP Paribas’ UK headquarters, and Pharus (2000) for the Cass Sculpture Foundation. Ascent won the Royal Society of British Sculptors Silver Medal, and led to Mayer’s election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

Mayer’s works drew influence from her regular practice of meditation, as well as seismic events in her personal life: Tree of Life, and later further tree-inspired forms such as Joy, Unity, Abundance, Friendship, Laughter and Hope (2006) stem from the impact of the death of her son Julian in 1989.

In 2006, through the creation of Thornflower, Mayer confronted her experience of the Holocaust, and the personal impact of the loss of her grandmother, Růžena Stutzová. Mayer gradually came to regard the work not only as a Holocaust Memorial piece, but as a sculpture that speaks of reconciliation and unity in times of darkness and inhumanity. In 2019, the piece joined the permanent collection at Coventry Cathedral.

Mayer continued to work consistently until her death in 2022, experimenting with a wide range of media and painting. Notable pieces included Solar (2009), Guardian (2009), and Monumental Turning (2016). Commissioned for a new office park development in Bicester, the latter is Mayer’s largest sculpture to date.

Exhibitions Hodgkins/Hubbard/Mayer, Royal Society of British Artists, 1999 Solo Show, Ashbourne Gallery, Derbyshire, 1999 Charlotte Mayer – Recent Sculptures, Gallery Pangolin, Gloucestershire Sculpture 2000, Milton Keynes General Hospital, 2000 Bronze: Contemporary British Sculpture, Holland Park, London, 2000 Solo Show, Bohun Gallery, Henley on Thames, 2002 Sterling Stuff, RA Friends' Room, London, 2003; Sigurjon Olafsson Museum, Reykjavík, 2003; Gallery Pangolin, Gloucestershire, 2002 Deirdre Hubbard & Charlotte Mayer, Thompson’s Gallery, London, 2003 Solo show, Matara Centre, Gloucestershire, 2004 Sculpture in the Garden: RBS Centenary, University of Leicester, 2005 Quartet – Four Czech Sculptors, Curwen & New Academy Gallery, London, 2005 Fe2O5 Gili, Mayer, Rance, Tebbenhoff, Vollmer, Canary Wharf, London, 2006, APT Gallery, London, 2006, & Myles Meehan Gallery, Darlington, 2005 Solo show, Rachel Bebb Contemporary, Hampshire, 2006 All Female Cast, Gallery Pangolin, Gloucestershire, 2006 Sterling Stuff II, Pangolin London, 2008 Fire and Brimstone, Gallery Pangolin, Gloucestershire, 2009 The Thornflower & other works, Salisbury Cathedral, 2009 The Thornflower, Southwark Cathedral, London, 2010 Crucible, Gloucester Cathedral, 2010 Mayer & Von Stumm, Turrill Garden, Oxford, 2011 Women Make Sculpture, Pangolin London, 2011 Sculptors’ Drawings, Pangolin London, 2012 Two in One: Charlotte Mayer & Almuth Tebbenhoff, Pangolin London, 2012 Charlotte Mayer: The Space Between, Pangolin London, 2019 Feathers, Bones & Stones, Pangolin London, 2021 Charlotte Mayer: A Life in the Studio, Pangolin London, 2023