fragments 07, 2020

Painting with pastel on canvas

Dimensions: 54 x 20 x 6 cm

Angela Eisenköck, born in 1953, has been working with painting and graphic art for about 15 years. Already in the 1970s, during her studies of architecture at the Graz University of Technology, she felt a strong desire for a creative engagement with visual arts. There she gained her first experience in artistic design at the Institute of Architecture with Adelhard Roidinger, who is known today mainly as a jazz musician and who also gave lectures on cybernetic methods. Her artistic ambition initially focused on portrait painting. Above all, she admired the often disturbing pictures of human figures by the South African painter Marlene Dumas. In addition, she also created a series of ink brush drawings in portrait format of portrait heads in a very reduced colour scheme with strong light-dark contrasts.

In 2018, a new phase of work began with large-format pastels on canvas entitled "Fragments". During a stay in hospital, Angela Eisenköck observed the slow decay of the many magnificent bouquets of flowers in her hospital room and this process of decay provoked her perception or awakened in her the will for artistic representation.

This phenomenon of nature's transience became more and more the focus of her artistic interest and demanded further intensive aesthetic examination. However, it is not the lush splendour of the floral world that attracts her to draw and paint, but the inconspicuous, bent leaves of, for example, a faded rose, in its state of withering and dying, or a dried-up cone that has fallen from a coniferous tree.