Divine Disruption

Ernst Fischer and Julia von Eichel

September 25 - January 11, 2016

Julia von Eichel (b. St. Gellen, Switzerland) has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York; Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, Lucien Terras, New York. She has forthcoming shows at Winston Wachter Gallery, New York, as well as a group show at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. Group exhibitions include Drawn to Detail, curated by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; Infinite Line, curated by Elizabeth Ferrer, Brick Rotunda Gallery; and Contemporary Watercolors, curated by Veronica Roberts, Morgan Lehman Gallery. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and the Ritz Carlton. 

Ernst Fischer ( b. Zürich, Switzerland ) lives and works in New York City. He attended the Hochschule der Künste, Zürich and The London Film School before receiving an MFA from Columbia University, New York. His work has been exhibited at The Cue Foundation, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Fotografie Forum Frankfurt; and 247365, Brooklyn, among others. Fischer has contributed texts to Rethinking Marxism and his editorial work has been featured in Frieze, I-D, Dazed, and The Guardian. He is currently a visiting professor of photography at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. 

Julia von Eichel creates her architectonic sculptures with mylar, plastic, glue, wood, silk, acrylic, and thread. Ethereal, ghost-like, and delicate, her transparent works have a modern architectural austerity, exemplified particularly in those made with clear plexiglass containers, but also in her jagged cloud-like wall reliefs. A dependence upon the white wall renders her works barely visible, as if the artist wants to camouflage them with light, in this case taking advantage of Richard Meier’s own dedication to the color.

Ernst Fischer’s digital photographs and videos materialize out of his interaction with machines rather than the artist’s direct hand. He instructs his computer’s algorithms to create mutations of the images fed in. His starting point may be a portrait, or a still life using microphotography, or even the image of a well known European painting. But since Fischer is more interested in the machine’s limitations rather than its capabilities, he intentionally overwhelms it with visual information -- specifically data from large jpegs -- in order to force the compromised results.

An accomplished photographer and printer, Fischer works with light to create areas of darkness and spectacular highlights. Asking the computer to execute his requests, his goal is to create uncertainty and variance within the image data itself; the resulting abstracted colors and shapes have painterly flourishes that are smoothed by virtue of the computer screen or the paper on which he prints. His videos in particular are built with photographs taken of historic paintings (Fragonard, Rubens, Velazquez, and others) and presented as they actively mutate. Morphing from one state to another, they appear liquid in the process.

Like Julia von Eichel, Fischer seems to want to speak to the divine in his pursuit of meaning, considering human, machine, and god all at once. While for Fischer it’s his close connection to the machine that allows him to approximate divine beauty, von Eichel achieves similar results through hands-on, pure human experience.     

Von Eichel’s ornate sculptures are hand-made; they were conceived of in her studio during a period of intense personal loss. Intuitively formed, they have an almost supernatural perfection, as if defying gravity. In her latest work, she’s constructed complex armatures with wood dowels, wiffle balls, string and thread tightly covered with gessoed silk. The prickly surface conceals the inner structure, stretched taught upon the assemblage beneath, like skin.     

Suzy Spence, Curator, New York, September 2016