Charlotte Mayer, who has died aged 93, belonged to the generation of Central European Jews who went to Britain as refugees from the Nazis and subsequently made a vital contribution to the country’s cultural life. Memories of the Holocaust, and especially of the murder of her maternal grandmother, Ružena, were translated by Mayer into the jagged, disturbing sculpture Thornflower (2006). Yet even there, the spines at the heart of the composition are combined with more comforting organic shapes, as if to represent life’s “duality”, as Mayer herself put it.
The fact that this curving, floral imagery also has more than a passing resemblance to apple peel is not accidental. Mayer’s use of such natural forms and, sometimes, materials drew heavily on her childhood experiences in Prague, at her grandparents’ home Das Rosel Haus (The House of Roses). Although this villa functioned as a kind of salon for the city’s artists, Mayer herself recalled most vividly deshelling walnuts and making little baskets from horse chestnuts with the housekeeper, Máde.
