Martin Eder: The Poor
12/07/2008 t/m 09/11/2008
We live in a world of desires and are tricked out of our actual hunger for it with dummies.
-Martin Eder
Provocative, almost kitschy paintings of baby animals and prototype females with perfect curves – that’s how we first saw Martin Eder’s work, in the 2007 group Netherlands / Germany - Painting / Malerei. Now, in his first ever solo exhibition in any Dutch museum, he reveals a completely different side of his work: a series of large-scale portrait photographs of practically naked women and girls who appear ravaged by life. These anti-glamorous nudes posed against a plain black background are both disquieting and magnetically attractive.
Photography is a new departure in the career of an artist who has previously worked in the fields of performance art and painting. True to his obsessive nature, Martin Eder (b. 1968, Augsburg) took over 200 pictures of each of his models (all of whom are personal friends and acquaintances), before eventually selecting just one photograph of each of them for inclusion in the final series. The image selected is the one that seems to him to express the concentrated emotional essence of the person concerned.
Many of his models have a despondent quality; staring emptily into space, they look pathetically lost and vulnerable. One has a huge bruise on her thigh, another is pallid and skeletal, while the physique of a third makes her the helpless victim of gravity. Even so, these ‘poor’ all possess a kind of power; they seem to bear their suffering with a mixture of pride and resignation.
The portraits raise issues about identity. What is the nature of beauty and ugliness? Where does the dividing line lie between the external world and the inner life? At what point does the erotic become repugnant? Eder succeeds in making the fragility of his subjects painfully tangible without ever making the viewer a voyeur. Eder’s pictures are not pornographic because he never creates an atmosphere that deliberately involves the viewer in the situation. Despite the sometimes explicit poses of his models, the effect of the pictures is to make the viewer aware of the state of mind of the subject, rather than feel physically attracted to her.
The series is painterly in quality and evokes associations with seventeenth-century portrait painting. Loneliness, sexuality, mortality and desire are all bound up together in this challenging series of photographs to produce a commentary on the stylised and unreal depiction of the female body and the erotic in today’s world.
The exhibition is the product of cooperation with the Kunsthalle Mannheim and is accompanied by a bilingual (German/English) catalogue entitled Martin Eder, Die Armen (Price €39.95).
On Sunday 13 July, Martin Eder will give a Master Class at the Vrije Academie workplace for the visual arts in The Hague (bookable via 070 3638968).
