LINZ.-The Museum of Modern Art in Linz opened the exhibit Eva & Adele. RED. New paintings and graphics through June 1. "The whole world" knows EVA & ADELE, the extravagant artist couple from Berlin that has been adding glamor to the major events of the international art world for over fifteen years: conspicuous, sparkling, attractive.
Yet EVA & ADELE's work is more than their self-invention and self-presentation as a live act and living art work. For their solo exhibition at the Lentos Art Museum EVA & ADELE have conceived a presentation of their artistic work in a comprehensive survey ranging from a large sculpture, a series of picture panel objects, about 25 paintings and several hundred drawings. The selection from their painting oeuvre focuses on works from recent years.
Upon entering the foyer, visitors are received by EVA & ADELE's Biographical Sculpture No. 9, House of Futuring, a walk-in construction made of 151 canvases. The next encounter, the Golden Manifesto, materializes the artists' conceptual stance: the slogans "Coming out of the future", "Wherever we are is museum" and "Over the boundaries of gender" are arranged as panels gilded with gold leaf. Shown for the first time in Lentos, the Performative Installation 208 is a 3 x 12 meter long composition of works on paper, a radical investigation of material and technique inviting visitors to enter into a kind of morphological game, to drift through multiply superimposed forms and shapes. Stringency and chaos, a mysterious language of symbols, the puzzling abundance of forms and signs, portraits and the recurring logo of EVA & ADELE demonstrate affinity and harmony and disparity and individuality at the same time. What is striking about these works is their diversity and their tension, their power and their delicateness.
The central ensemble of the exhibition is Transformer-Performer (2005-2008). The large format paintings show forceful images, which achieve their intensive effect with complex layering and interpenetration, intensive colors, collage elements and emblematic subject matter: animals, mythical creatures, winged beings, women in fetishized clothing, male sex organs, enchanting object - and again and again themselves, EVA & ADELE. The mediatization of the art figure EVA & ADELE is expanded in painting. At the same time, the depiction of EVA & ADELE is the basis and framework for the painting, for questions raised in painting. Based on and beyond this, EVA & ADELE formulate solutions for contemporary painting art.
Like the creation of their self (their life, their external appearance), EVA & ADELE's artistic work is also based on a strategy of pictorial development, with which social issues are discussed with all their consequences - beyond the realm of expectations and conventions.
