Theresa Eipeldauer
27 Apr - 01 Jun 2016
THERESA EIPELDAUER
27 April – 01 June 2016
The artistic scope of Theresa Eipeldauer’s form language includes a wide range of materials and techniques, which refer back to the primacy of drawing and painting, while, at the same time, analysing these media in various ways and extending them to the next level of three-dimensionality. A range of basic colours are repeated in minimalist abstract formations, which are used in different media such as graphite drawing, screen printing, grounded canvas and sculpture and take up the issue of display options.
In her exhibition at the Krobath Gallery, Eipeldauer shows a selection of the wide spectrum of media used in her works, which on the whole explore the art history of abstract mechanisms. The basic element in Eipeldauer’s drawings is the line, which is constantly multiplied thus preempting industrial processes. Reproduction techniques used since the 20th century are very present in her works. Eipeldauer also treats the transition from the individual art piece to environment in her works playfully and with artful ease. The urge to define her three-dimensional works either as an ensemble or as individual works of art automatically recedes towards the background and the decision is left to the viewers. As Heike Maier-Rieper aptly puts it, the transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional works results in “an ambivalence between transparency and disguise”. 1) There are instances of transparency in the line drawings dealing with the multiplication of the topic “lines”. The drawings are displayed on plastic films and often hanging in a partition screen that can be accessed from both sides, and seem to neutralise the gravity of space. With this trope, Eipeldauer’s works refer back to Friedrich Kiesler’s display systems, which he had developed for the international exhibition of stage technology in Vienna in 1924. It was a modular, free-standing construction consisting of individual elements used in stage architecture and functioning as a display for objects and pictures. There are also references on the content level: some of Eipeldauer’s graphic formations refer back to Kiesler’s form language.
Eipeldauer’s works are reminiscent of graphic and abstract motifs from art history, and yet she takes a rather unconventional approach to the materials and technical methods she applies. What seems to be painting has not been created in the traditional way of applying oil on canvass, but by using various techniques of applying paint, such as serigraphy, or transparent plastic films. Sometimes she just grounds the canvass thus creating various shades of a colour. The pastel colours she prefers to use and which reappear throughout her oeuvre, are mint green and orange-pink. They appear, for example, as abstract colour fields in pictorial, painting-like tableaus on black background, or are used as grounding colours. The latter can comprise a range of nuances and merging fields of colour, or they can be extrapolated and transferred onto projects on canvas. The two objects “Torsogreen” and “Torsorosa” are examples for how the grounded canvas is cut, folded and turned into layered objects that resemble three-dimensional torso-like dimensions through being fragmented and then bundled into objects.
In her strict, graphically multiplied black-and-white pictures and three-dimensional objects as well as her colour-series printing methods and object constructions, the transition from two- to three-dimensionality in Eipeldauer’s works can be traced back to the “panta rhei” thesis of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. According to this thesis, everything is in a constant flow and transition and therefore it seems impossible to plunge twice into the same river.
1) Heike Maier-Rieper. “Theresa Eipeldauer.” in: 95-2015 Jubilee evn collection. Wien: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2015. S. 115.
Walter Seidl
Translation: Mandana Taban
27 April – 01 June 2016
The artistic scope of Theresa Eipeldauer’s form language includes a wide range of materials and techniques, which refer back to the primacy of drawing and painting, while, at the same time, analysing these media in various ways and extending them to the next level of three-dimensionality. A range of basic colours are repeated in minimalist abstract formations, which are used in different media such as graphite drawing, screen printing, grounded canvas and sculpture and take up the issue of display options.
In her exhibition at the Krobath Gallery, Eipeldauer shows a selection of the wide spectrum of media used in her works, which on the whole explore the art history of abstract mechanisms. The basic element in Eipeldauer’s drawings is the line, which is constantly multiplied thus preempting industrial processes. Reproduction techniques used since the 20th century are very present in her works. Eipeldauer also treats the transition from the individual art piece to environment in her works playfully and with artful ease. The urge to define her three-dimensional works either as an ensemble or as individual works of art automatically recedes towards the background and the decision is left to the viewers. As Heike Maier-Rieper aptly puts it, the transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional works results in “an ambivalence between transparency and disguise”. 1) There are instances of transparency in the line drawings dealing with the multiplication of the topic “lines”. The drawings are displayed on plastic films and often hanging in a partition screen that can be accessed from both sides, and seem to neutralise the gravity of space. With this trope, Eipeldauer’s works refer back to Friedrich Kiesler’s display systems, which he had developed for the international exhibition of stage technology in Vienna in 1924. It was a modular, free-standing construction consisting of individual elements used in stage architecture and functioning as a display for objects and pictures. There are also references on the content level: some of Eipeldauer’s graphic formations refer back to Kiesler’s form language.
Eipeldauer’s works are reminiscent of graphic and abstract motifs from art history, and yet she takes a rather unconventional approach to the materials and technical methods she applies. What seems to be painting has not been created in the traditional way of applying oil on canvass, but by using various techniques of applying paint, such as serigraphy, or transparent plastic films. Sometimes she just grounds the canvass thus creating various shades of a colour. The pastel colours she prefers to use and which reappear throughout her oeuvre, are mint green and orange-pink. They appear, for example, as abstract colour fields in pictorial, painting-like tableaus on black background, or are used as grounding colours. The latter can comprise a range of nuances and merging fields of colour, or they can be extrapolated and transferred onto projects on canvas. The two objects “Torsogreen” and “Torsorosa” are examples for how the grounded canvas is cut, folded and turned into layered objects that resemble three-dimensional torso-like dimensions through being fragmented and then bundled into objects.
In her strict, graphically multiplied black-and-white pictures and three-dimensional objects as well as her colour-series printing methods and object constructions, the transition from two- to three-dimensionality in Eipeldauer’s works can be traced back to the “panta rhei” thesis of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. According to this thesis, everything is in a constant flow and transition and therefore it seems impossible to plunge twice into the same river.
1) Heike Maier-Rieper. “Theresa Eipeldauer.” in: 95-2015 Jubilee evn collection. Wien: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2015. S. 115.
Walter Seidl
Translation: Mandana Taban