Martin Eder - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Martin Eder: La Paix du Cul, May 23 – July 1, 2006

  • Literature

    B. Sholis, “Road to Rush,” ArtForum, May 29, 2006; J. Saltz, Cash, “Clowns, and Carnival,” ArtnetMagazine.com, June 22, 2006

  • Catalogue Essay


    Like many of his colleagues in the flourishing young German painting scene,
    Martin Eder’s oeuvre combines technical mastery and a deep appreciation
    for the history of European painting with an appetite for current cultural
    influences and a mischievous, irony-laden sense of humor that is
    quintessentially contemporary.The motif of the reclining female nude,
    passed down from Dürer to Delacroix, Rembrant to Rodin, reappears in
    Eder’s Woman Masturbating Surrounded by Bad Towels, 2006, but with a
    twist: the figure’s hastily-removed undergarments, raunchy hand position
    and lustfully confrontational stare reveal that the image of her rosy cheeks,
    ample hips and rouged lips originated in the pages of a soft-core
    pornographic magazine, the source of much of Eder’s feminine imagery.
    The artist has transported his porn vixen from her glossy, mass-produced
    place of birth to a sinister, dreamlike and vaguely surrealistic seaside
    landscape where she lies in flagrante, oblivious to the threatening presence
    of a scarecrow-like figure in the background and surrounded, as the
    painting’s deadpan title suggests, by the very kitschiest of beach towels
    emblazoned with faces of large predator cats.
    Eder’s work is often compared to that of Jeff Koons for its brazen and
    humorous juxtaposition of traditional techniques and compositions with
    crude and self-consciously clichéd subject matter, but there is a pervasive
    darkness to Eder’s work, “a nightmarish feeling, which enhances their
    projection of a frighteningly ungrounded, disproportionate state of yearning
    that is the not-so-secret engine of capitalist consumerism,” (K. Johnson,
    “Art in Review: Martin Eder,” The NewYork Times, June 16, 2006). If Eder’s
    slick surfaces and campy sensibilities elicit a quick chuckle, it is one tinged
    with unease, for his appropriative and recontextualizing strategies are
    intended as a comment on the infantile desires that fuel this engine; a
    reflection, rendered in classical terms, of a contemporary media landscape
    that “displays human beings not only as the subject of their own selfconstitution
    but primarily as increasingly artificial products formed by
    multifarious factors-in turn determined by socio-cultural relationships,
    i.e. patterns of behavior/representation mechanisms-as reflected on a
    daily basis by the mass media, consumerism, its brands and glossy
    magazines,” (J.Winkelman, Martin Eder:The Return of the Anti-Soft,
    Höhmann-Haus, 2001).

  • Artist Biography

    Martin Eder

    • 1986

    Martin Eder's disturbing oil paintings examine the interaction of beauty and ugliness and are
    shown next to cute kittens and cuddly puppies, candid nudes in eerie, surreal encounters. In
    an almost scientific way, Eder has devoted himself to this since the beginning of his career
    exploring the illusory possibilities of painting and their meaning. Inspired by different streams
    of art history, including baroque and surrealism, represent his paintings the sentimental, the
    filthy, and the sublime side by side, forming the imagery of the classical History painting new.
    Eder breaks the generally accepted notions of what "fine art" should be and undermines
    conventional hierarchies of images and subjects. If you are looking for answers you are out of
    place in Eder's cosmos. But one encounters a silent guest – the uncanny.


    "Bodies are sold, they are abused, they are twisted, they are reinvented, they are drained, they
    are dragged around, thrown into cavities and left alone, locked in wrong perceptions, full of
    attitudes and fears. The spiritual part of it is, that your actions can only be controlled by a very
    strong mind, which is your spirit." Martin Eder


    Martin Eder is based in Berlin and graduated from HfBK Dresden in 2001.
     

    View More Works

34

Masturbating Woman Surrounded by Bad Towels

2006
Oil on canvas.
70 7/8 x 94 1/2 in. (180 x 240 cm).

Signed, titled and dated “Martin Eder
Masturbating Woman Surrounded by Bad Towels 0506” on the reverse; signed and dated
“Martin Eder 0506” lower right.

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $157,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York