Eva Pietzcker Art for Sale and Sold Prices

b. 1966 -

Even as a child, printmaking fascinated Eva Pietzcker, the almost magical emergence of an image as the paper is pulled from the block. Clearly, it has been a long journey leading to her current masterpieces of Japanese woodblock prints, images which, with their intense calm power, prompt a comparison to those of such artists as ??? Zhao Mengfu of the Yuan dynasty. What has been said about his contemporary, the Daoist ??? Fang Congyi, applies just as well to Eva Pietzcker’s work: “He painted landscapes which gave form to the formless and which transformed the formed into an existence beyond form.” ›Mountains and Rivers‹, ?? shan chuan, is the Chinese Term for landscape. As mountains and rivers—or their absence—form a landscape’s character, so the rocks and water levels in Eva Pietzcker’s prints give hints to the magical presence of the captured sceneries.

Eva Pietzcker, who was born in Tübingen in 1966, studied Fine Art at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg from 1987 until 1992, and then at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Since 1991 she has worked as a free-lance artist in Berlin with a focus on printmaking, initially working on etchings and screen prints. With her discovery of the Japanese style of woodblock printmaking she found her true medium. About this technique she writes: ”Compared to the Western method, where oil-based ink, applied to the block with a roller, is printed onto the paper's surface with the help of a press, in the Japanese style, watercolor paint is applied to the block with brushes and printed by hand allowing the color to seep deep into the soft Japanese paper. As a result, these Japanese style prints tend to have a more painterly appearance and can often resemble watercolor paintings.”

This technique lends itself well to the art of landscape painting, which quickly became the major theme of Eva Pietzcker's work. From her images, qualities of deep stillness and intense expression emerge. The creation of these prints happens in two stages. On location, often after hours of searching for the perfect view, sometimes sitting in a small boat on a lake, a water-color drawing is created by quick sketching. Sometimes it is like a race with the light, as it changes from one moment to the next. Afterwards, at home in the studio, the plates are cut requiring high precision and quiet concentration in an atmosphere of meditative focus. The communion of these two poles: the lightning-fast sketching of a fleeting mood without room for calculating thoughts, and then the process of translation through the cutting of the blocks with absolute concentration and free from distraction - these are the outer processes by which these works of mysterious and fascinating effect are created.

I first came to know Eva Pietzcker's work in a small gallery in Berlin Kreuzberg. More specifically, it was on an invitation card for the opening which featured an etching by Eva Pietzcker, chosen by the gallery owner with the assumption that it's overwhelming impression would attract visitors to the gallery. It was a true “Oh wow!” experience. The card accomplished its mission. I visited the show – and I purchased the print.

Now if I ponder the question, what is it that so fascinates the viewer about Eva's prints, that literally pulls the viewer in, I find myself in some tricky territory. For experts it is easy to talk about art, so long as they assess the technique, classify the style, or explain the artist’s contribution to the genre. Certainly technical mastery contributes to the impact of the work, showing itself in the complex multi-color woodblock prints with their hairline contours, impressive even to the layperson. Yet the impact on the viewer is no less strong in the works which appear, on the surface, to be more simple. Moreover, modern day observers have so come to expect perfection in art that they would rather comment on its absence than appreciate its presence. The impact of Eva’s work on the viewer has perhaps more to do with that transcendent dimension which distinguishes true works of art from those which only strive to be. To say something of substance about this is difficult for a person of these rationally-oriented times. A woodblock print is an image, whereas our modern language – with the exception of poetry of course – is more specifically suited, through the use of well-defined terms, for depicting objective connections. So for this question a poem may be helpful, perhaps one of the legendary poems from the Tang period, famous for their natural ambiance.