Margret Eicher | Embarkation for Cythera
January 20 - March 3, 2007
Opening: Saturday, January 20, 11 am - 9 pm

Filipp Rosbach Galerie is pleased to present an exhibition with tapestries by Margret Eicher. This is her first exhibition with the gallery and in Leipzig.

The terror of the surface. Like all of Margret Eicher's, tapestries, the »Embarkation for Cythera« is also a hybrid between embodiment and dis-embodiment. Its literal materiality generates a physical presence that is then contradicted by the smooth, artificial hyper-perfection of the bodies depicted. The title alludes to Watteau's famous picture of the same name of the year 1717. In his painting, which hangs in the Louvre, Watteau depicts the journey of various couples to the ionic island of Cythera, which in Greek mythology is described as a place of bliss and as a sanctuary of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The embarkation for Cythera therefore appears as a metaphor for the power of imagination, in which suggestion of an ideal, idyllic landscape is more powerful than reality itself.
Margret Eicher's version of the amorous cythera myth is based on an advertising motif of the fashion house Dolce & Gabbana and turns the lovers, whose happiness lies in a remote, dream-lost picture that never need become reality.
Framed in a border of luxuriant vegetation, embellished in the four corners by intertwined orgiastic bodies as a kind of ornamentalisation of eternal pornographic lust, Eicher's Cythera tapestry sends out a message of frozen paralysis. The nature of the tiger and leopard cubs, domesticated into nothing more than cuddly toys, forms he perfect background for a physicality which obtains its satisfaction solely from an isolated egocentricity and the worship of one's own body, and in which the reference point is no longer nature but its art form, the figure of narcissus, frozen in a pose, in a picture.
The travellers in Margret Eicher's picture, in contrast, know neither the joy of arrival nor the pain of departure, nor the yearning that lies in-between. Caught in the agony of an eternal mirror phantasm, they are picturebook bodies in a pictorial narrative, proving that true terror comes from the perfect surface.
Stephan Berg, Director Kunstverein Hannover

We look forward to your visit! Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach and Jörg Rosbach
The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.