ProjectB is pleased to present the first exhibition in Italy by the
artist Martin Eder. The show features eight, disparately sized paintings that
reveal the distinctive and virtuoso touch of the great German painter. Eder
habitually chooses to express himself in a versatile, eclectic way, moving
between oils, watercolours and musical performance.
Phenomena – a title that comes from the film
of the same name by Dario Argento, which influenced the artist's practice
through its particular use of colour – is a selection of provocative new works
executed in a palette that ranges nonchalantly “from pale flesh tones to
velvety reds and lapis lazuli blues". In the text she has written for this
exhibition, Jane Neal details how these colors are also synonymous with Renaissance painting in Northern Europe
and explains how Eder is focusing on the
theme of vanitas and the memento mori – where “a serpent makes
its bed amidst the frothy petals of a flower … and Angels and warrior maidens
are captured not in flight nor in battle, but at rest…” to Neal, Eder is
engaging with the stylistic expression of a rediscovered harmony with the
Renaissance, the Baroque and Romanticism - all of which surfaced during a
recent trip by the artist to Mexico.
Eder's grounds are dominated by young women and soft animals. They bring the semi-surreal paintings
a sense of engaging perversion. Eder's women are painted in styles that may
variously reference Botticelli, Cranach, Renoir, and Manet: but all are
individuals taken from a superstructure and affected by a level of constraint –
which results in figures that appear stripped, rather than nude. This in turn
reveals a fragile balance between fantasy and reality wherein lies the
difficult relationship for all of us with our bodies; a subject which remains
one of the artist’s favourite areas of research. In his paintings, Eder
explores feminism through muses who rather than being passively subject, are
cast instead in armour - warrior women who hark back to German romanticism,
while simultaneously reflecting the struggles of contemporary young people
today whose relationships with their bodies have been made even more complex by
the Internet generation’s easy access to pornographic imagery and to a practice
of posting and reading posting hundreds of personal and formerly private
pictures. By choosing to create images which engage directly with the focus of
a culture that is driven by what is superficially attractive, and blind to
deeper meaning, and by playing with a language that borders on kitsch, Eder
challenges the formal system of the “Fine Arts,” in a directly confrontational
and insightful way and thus provides a means of widening the perspective of
people’s tastes by exposing that which is often unseen or overlooked. “Eder’s
focus is not only on painting itself or its formal traditions, but on painting
as an easily understandable technique and language, a sort of magical hat that
allows him to enter into and explore the kingdoms of taste and distinction” (Jane
Neal).
Phenomena is part of a trilogy of projects
that investigate the extrasensory world, which the artist has recently explored
through the study of hypnosis. Besides the exhibition in the gallery, Martin
Eder is preparing the show PY5IGKC at MUDAM, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Luxembourg, and the
performance Mental Physics & Rays of Lucifer at the Volksbühne in Berlin.
Martin Eder, Die Heisse Stirn Verglüht, 2017, oil on canvas, 75x50 cm (detail)
Martin Eder, Prüfung / The Test, 2017, oil on canvas, 50x33 cm
Martin Eder, Orakel / The Oracle, 2017, oil on canvas, 50x33 cm
Martin Eder, Materialization, 2017, oil on canvas, 50x33 cm
Martin Eder, Erscheinung / Appearance, 2017, oil on canvas, 50x33 cm
ProjectB s.r.l. a socio unico
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