Gritty, grimy and yet magical
There is nothing precious about the gritty, grimy, sometimes even coarse abstract paintings of Berlinbased artist Michaela Eichwald. They work their considerable magic in spite of it.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say in concert with it. These are paintings that operate on carefully balanced tensions generated between attraction and repulsion. As a characteriza- tion for the social and cultural conditions in which art exists today, that’s pretty spoton.
The nine compelling paintings in Eichwald’s show at Overduin & Co., her f ine solo debut in Los Angeles, share an unusual support. Using a variety of paints — acrylic, oil, tempera, lacquer — plus graphite and wax, she paints on stretched surfaces of pleather, the imitation leather fabric made from polycarbonate. The diverse painting materials don’t always gel with one another, creating surfaces as discordant as the agitated lines and unsettled shapes they describe. The pleather support generates a dull sheen.
For the works’ painterly, organic shapes and loosely totemic forms, Eichwald draws on several brash precedents since World War II. Among them are Abstract Expressionism, Japanese Gutai and 1980s Neo- Expressionism, both German and American.
The brutish and inf luential work of Georg Baselitz and Sigmar Polke thrums in works like “Duns Scotus,” named for a medieval philosopher who insisted that existence is pure abstraction.
Her shapes and palette often echo the viscera in something like Arshile Gorky’s 1944 “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” — albeit notably without the radiant inner glow of that masterpiece — or a jampacked André Butzer mural with all the vivid color drained out. Perhaps because of the pleather support, the light in Eichwald’s paintings seems on the verge of f lickering out. Entrails mix with the scatological earthiness of ordure on surfaces textured like brittle skin.
The show is titled with Delphic aphorisms in Greek and Latin — “quo vadis, gnothi sauton and cui bono.” Where are you going? Know thyself. To whose benefit?
The last, cited by Cicero, is used today to identify the basis for a crime. In Eichwald’s tough yet somehow also tender paintings, things are not always what they first seem to be.
Overduin & Co., 6693 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, ( 323) 464- 3600, through Aug. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.overduinandco.com