HAWAII Print

Sebastian M Sync (b. 1973, Germany — also known in photography as Sebastian Mayer) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Zürich. Long before the camera entered his toolkit, he was drawing and painting: self-published comics in his teens led to a first solo drawing show in Berlin at nineteen. He later chose to study Media Art at the bildo akademie berlin, concentrating on photography and visual theory, yet painting and works on paper remained a parallel, continuous practice during years spent living and working in Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and elsewhere. Since founding his Zürich studio Die Hermeneutische Garage in 2020, Sync has focused on large-scale canvases, drawings and hybrid pieces he calls abstract comic expressionism—gestural, noise-inflected images that fuse abstract expressionism, Art Brut and comic iconography. The work channels repetitive mark-making, vivid colour and textual fragments, often developed to Japanese noise music and informed by Situationist détournement (the tactic of re-using or hijacking existing imagery to subvert its meaning). Photography released under the Sebastian Mayer name has appeared in Dazed & Confused, Wire, Spex and other publications, while Sync’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited across Europe and Asia, including underground shows at Berlin’s 'Ill Galleries' and the legendary 'Galerie BerlinTokyo'.