A strange collection of objects and materials are embedded with Michaela Eichwald’s brilliant, surreal paintings and sculptures. Cement, wood preserver and wax are sloshed onto canvases along with smaller paintings or booklike appendages. Coins, pins, pebbles, fishing tackle and half a boiled egg are among the small objects dropped into resin-filled rubber gloves, plastic bags or bottles, becoming fixed for perpetuity in the piss-coloured sticky clods that crown her sculptures. It’s the casual accidents and ephemeral minutiae of our world – the stains and the scraps – that assume focus in Eichwald’s compositions. With titles such as Sehnsucht nach Abstraktion, Anti-fun und dem Beginn des endlichen Lebens (Desire for Abstraction, Anti-fun and the Beginning of Finite Life, 2011) or the more earthy MILF, Eichwald’s work has as much humour as beauty. An artist and writer, Eichwald was a protagonist of the Cologne art scene during the 1990s before she moved to Berlin, where she currently lives and works. Last year she was awarded the 2012 Prix Lafayette and this year she will have a solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
This article was originally published in the March 2013 issue.
