27 Jan - 19 Mar 15
Margret Eicher is a German conceptual artist specialising in tapestry. Margret is famous for her enormous tapestries, in which she combines baroque imagery with well-known and familiar images of our information society. The central motifs of her tapestries relate to current images of photojournalism and advertising from print and digital media. The icons of our modern information society are reproduced in a conceptually well-founded piracy of images, taken from a wide range of sources. Her art is its own kind of symbiosis, a synthesis and a blend of classical traditions and modernity. This quality makes her tapestries extremely relevant today.
Her artistic position is not that of a creator, but of a creative recipient. Through a selective use of imagery, the artist reproduces a cultural or political statement. ‘Borrowing’ as a cultural and artistic act dates back to the twentieth century with the emergence of collages and montages. In Margret's works, this takes on a critical and political stance.
In her tapestries, the artist adheres to the predominant pillars of tapestry manufacture. Preserving the frame of the central composition, created according to the historical and traditional functional symbols and semantics, Eicher introduces hints of modernity in a canonized form (with stencil).
Margret Eicher's media-tapestries are high-tech industrial products and inexpensive handiwork. In Flanders, the birthplace of court tapestries, the textile industry is very active manufacturing copies of old images to sell as souvenirs on the international market. The artist deliberately chooses to replace traditional and expensive tapestries because this replacing of traditions is an example of amusements typical of our time, based on the collective use of intellectual property.
Tapestry was first mentioned in Homer's Odyssey, and, in Metamorphoses, Ovid describes tapestry looms and subjects embroidered on them. Europeans became acquainted with the art of rug manufacturing during the Crusades, when the works of the Oriental masters - the tapestries, also called espaliers, were taken back as trophies. In Eastern countries, tapestries are part of everyday life, however in the West they took on a new meaning and became a symbol of aristocracy, wealth, power and education. They were transformed into an essential element of decoration in palaces and castles. According to the esthetics of the time, tapestries were eternally linked to the architectural environment, and could not exist outside of it. They became a type of movable artistic inventory, thanks to which the court would appear in all its beauty in a multitude of palaces, and being not only imagery, it would occupy a common space.
Margret Eicher is a German conceptual artist specializing in tapestry. Margret is famous for her enormous tapestries, in which she combines baroque imagery with well-known and familiar images of our information society. The central motifs of her tapestries relate to current images of photojournalism and advertising from print and digital media. The icons of our modern information society are reproduced in a conceptually well-founded piracy of images, taken from a wide range of sources. Her art is its own kind of symbiosis, a synthesis and a blend of classical traditions and modernity. This quality makes her tapestries extremely relevant today.
Her artistic position is not that of a creator, but of a creative recipient. Through a selective use of imagery, the artist reproduces a cultural or political statement. 'Borrowing' as a cultural and artistic act dates back to the twentieth century with the emergence of collages and montages. In Margret's works, this takes on a critical and political stance.
In her tapestries, the artist adheres to the predominant pillars of tapestry manufacture. Preserving the frame of the central composition, created according to the historical and traditional functional symbols and semantics, Eicher introduces hints of modernity in a canonized form (with stencil).
Margret Eicher's media-tapestries are high-tech industrial products and inexpensive handiwork. In Flanders, the birthplace of court tapestries, the textile industry is very active manufacturing copies of old images to sell as souvenirs on the international market. The artist deliberately chooses to replace traditional and expensive tapestries because this falsification of traditions is an example of amusements typical of our time, based on the collective use of intellectual property.
Media tapestries.
Digital picture montage and power representation in baroque style.
The large-format tapestries in their baroque picture and material presence obtain their central motifs from topical media pictures, press photos and other icons of our information society, which were adopted from the most different public picture resources by means of a conceptually justified piracy. Here, the artistic attitude is no longer that of a creator but has developed into that of a producing recipient – selective consumption as a basis for making a cultural or political statement. This adoption as an artistic-conceptual act has its origin in collage and montage.
Here, it takes a critical and political stand.
The tapestries are the result of a weaving method based on digital technology – they are not “genuine” tapestries but quotations of this historical value-connoted medium – industrial “forgeries”, made in Belgium, the native country of classical tapestry and today's souvenir replica.
The confronting combination of the historical medium of representation and today's communication media aims at analysing the power of pictures and examining the importance of encoded but complex value statements and world pictures. Against the phenomenon of a globally communicating “feudal society” with “majesties” from politics and business, show business and sports, the reproduction of the baroque tapestry in a media-artistic position develops a subtle and critical irony.