REviEws eva rothSChILd
Installation view,
modern art, London, 2005.
Courtesy the artist,
Stuart Shave / modern
art, London, the modern
Institute, Glasgow,
Galerie eva presenhuber,
Zurich, and 303 Gallery,
new york
Eva Rothschild
South London GaLLery, London
13 Septem ber – 4 novem ber
At first sight Eva Rothschild’s show of 11 new sculptures and wall works Woven leather snakes-cum-whips, looped lasciviously around a
seems like a captivating playroom filled with the kind of toys one of Tim geometric black wooden frame in The Narrow Way, cheekily further the
Burton’s gothic moppets could have some fun with. There are ‘drawings in S&M frisson in their references to flagellation and temptation. But S&M
space’, like Mr Messy (all works 2007), in which a dense ball of crazed loops, is pain that we desire, pain that we’re prepared to pay for, a kind of pain
formed from the twisting of wire covered in black plastic tubes, sits atop a that has become aestheticised into a fashion statement. In fact, what most
plinth of spindly painted steel rods, looking for all the world like a giant head frequently comes to mind when looking at Rothschild’s plaited or streaming
scribbled out in a temper tantrum; while Higher Love, three entwined rings leather is the high-end craft value of designer handbags. But perhaps this
suspended from the ceiling and wrapped in leather that cascades to the is a yet another of her plays with the dissolution of meaning, referencing
floor, brings to mind both the dreamcatchers hung by hippy parents over sculpture’s place as a consumable object within our hypercapitalist moment,
children’s beds and the lashings of BDSM. and the inevitable mindset we bring to it.
Rothschild has said that she is interested in how people move their Ironically, the side effect of all this back and forth of form and concept
spiritual desires between different objects and traditions, and the exhibition is that the magic transformation, where the object becomes more than its
has obviously been set up to encourage a loose mobility of references. materiality and turns into that thing called art, can never really effectively
While visual unity is achieved through the application of shiny minimalist take place. Riches, a large black Perspex diamond shape set into a corner,
black (with flashes of blood-red and bone-white), other formal connections is given the illusion of depth by the reflection of thin wooden strips that
are erratically disrupted between works that move from the monumental to straddle its void, but it’s hard to go very far beyond the sleek surfaces of
the spindly, referencing all manner of recent art-historical -isms, and kitted Rothschild’s work. Skye Sherwin
out with the trappings of New Ageism or Christian symbols. It presents a
giddy journey through the lightning-fast evolution of sculpture in the past
century, alongside our increasingly fractured, tokenistic belief systems,
pointing up crises of meaning for both. Yet these darker implications never
quite go beyond the realm of entertainment.
195 aRtREviEw
November_REVIEWS.indd 195 26/9/07 13:32:22
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