Lot 6: EVA ROTHSCHILD

B. 1972
SUPERSOFT

measurements
180 by 55 by 1.5cm.

alternate measurements
70 7/8 by 21 3/4 by 5/8 in.

acrylic paint and lacquer on steel

Executed in 2006.

PROVENANCE

Donated by the artist, courtesy of The Modern Institute, Glasgow, and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

NOTE

A multi-coloured star-burst of interwoven incense sticks; a pyramid of shiny black acrylic, pointed at the top like a magician's hat; a totemic head, it's contours hidden beneath fronds of supple leather; a hippy, Op Art Madonna woven from day-glo strips of yellow, pink and green. In their shapes and materials, Eva Rothschild's sculptures are laced with a sense of the Gothic, and injected with the language of ritual, New Age mysticism and 60s counterculturalism. Shimmering from the gallery walls, cascading from above our heads, suspended in space with no visible support or burning and disappearing before our very eyes, they are like small miracles that defy their physicality. Rothschild studied at Goldsmiths College and has shown at the Kunsthalle Zurich (2004), the 54th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2004) and was recently included in the 2006 Tate Triennial.

Rothschild's choice of images and forms have tended to reveal a fascination with the iconography of mysticism, spirituality and romanticism. Often hand-made and domestic in scale, they associate craft with an other worldly element. Yet they also conjure up the worlds of fake healers and market stalls, of a spirituality reduced to accessories for mass consumption. Drawing parallels with the aura with which we invest art itself, her works point to the possibility of enlightenment and simultaneously deny it, reflecting on our need to imbue inanimate objects with more esoteric and mystical qualities. "I think we furnish our desires with objects and images", the artist has stated. "It's like we need something tangible to prop up our intangible beliefs". (cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Early One Morning, 2002, p.131)

Since 2005 Rothschild has paired her sculptures down to the most essential vocabulary. Lines and outlines are given the very barest of physical substance, pushed to and inhabiting the outer edges of form, at once more abstract and architectural. In some, interlocking triangles made of wood hang down, like bats' wings, from a corner in the ceiling, as though drawn from plan elevations in which line and shape have been turned into form, rotated in space, assembled and reassembled from differing perspectives. Elsewhere, outlined semi-geometric shapes sit perched on their four-legged base, like scientific exhibits whose angular, molecular shape lays bare sculpture's very DNA. Others still resemble the roots in a tree, lines that travel and bend downwards, their surface marked by bands of colour that alternate as though driven by the logic of an invisible, internal binary code.

Like Day One, 2005 -- the first work in the series -- Supersoft presents a form that resembles a simple stick, a line drawn in space, on which hand painted bands in a variety of different colours provide the minimum of artistic intervention. Its silhouette is barely registered by the eye, and only very slightly fleshed out by the shallow physicality it reveals when approached. Defying gravity and improbably rising from the ground, its delicate presence is counterbalanced by the stubborn resilience of nature forcing its way through the cracks in urban concrete. Its elongated form rises from the base in a tentative, crooked line, like a twitching divining rod as it seeks its way, while the rainbow colours that cloak its surface hum with the bright and funky rhythms of a ritual party stick. AT