Martin Eder — Gazing Males

Martin Eder’s series Martyrium depicts naked artists and actors posing in different ways which connect to the notion of zeitgeist as well as to art history. In the commonplace these concepts are hardly seen as intertwined. But often noticed as only loosely connected, they share a dialectic entanglement that should not be overlooked.

Due to intense context shifts that somehow seem to oscillate from one to another perspective on the dialectical causalities – from artist to models, men to women, gazer to gazed upon and from romanticism as zeitgeist to abstraction as art history and vice versa – Eder does not simply impose these dispositive factors but lays open their contingency. You can almost sense the arbitrary genesis of these categories and withdraw from their truth as being brought upon us historically. Who is watching whom and isn’t the narcissistic artist a performing model him-/herself? One can imagine that it could have been and still can be different. But that is a slippery slope to walk upon.

WORDS: SIMON LUNKENHEIMER

Martin Eder, The Damned, 2017, Oil on canvas, 150 cm x 100 cm