Like many of his colleagues in the flourishing young German painting scene,
Martin Eder’s oeuvre combines technical mastery and a deep appreciation
for the history of European painting with an appetite for current cultural
influences and a mischievous, irony-laden sense of humor that is
quintessentially contemporary.The motif of the reclining female nude,
passed down from Dürer to Delacroix, Rembrant to Rodin, reappears in
Eder’s Woman Masturbating Surrounded by Bad Towels, 2006, but with a
twist: the figure’s hastily-removed undergarments, raunchy hand position
and lustfully confrontational stare reveal that the image of her rosy cheeks,
ample hips and rouged lips originated in the pages of a soft-core
pornographic magazine, the source of much of Eder’s feminine imagery.
The artist has transported his porn vixen from her glossy, mass-produced
place of birth to a sinister, dreamlike and vaguely surrealistic seaside
landscape where she lies in flagrante, oblivious to the threatening presence
of a scarecrow-like figure in the background and surrounded, as the
painting’s deadpan title suggests, by the very kitschiest of beach towels
emblazoned with faces of large predator cats.
Eder’s work is often compared to that of Jeff Koons for its brazen and
humorous juxtaposition of traditional techniques and compositions with
crude and self-consciously clichéd subject matter, but there is a pervasive
darkness to Eder’s work, “a nightmarish feeling, which enhances their
projection of a frighteningly ungrounded, disproportionate state of yearning
that is the not-so-secret engine of capitalist consumerism,” (K. Johnson,
“Art in Review: Martin Eder,” The NewYork Times, June 16, 2006). If Eder’s
slick surfaces and campy sensibilities elicit a quick chuckle, it is one tinged
with unease, for his appropriative and recontextualizing strategies are
intended as a comment on the infantile desires that fuel this engine; a
reflection, rendered in classical terms, of a contemporary media landscape
that “displays human beings not only as the subject of their own selfconstitution
but primarily as increasingly artificial products formed by
multifarious factors-in turn determined by socio-cultural relationships,
i.e. patterns of behavior/representation mechanisms-as reflected on a
daily basis by the mass media, consumerism, its brands and glossy
magazines,” (J.Winkelman, Martin Eder:The Return of the Anti-Soft,
Höhmann-Haus, 2001).