Lot 48: MARTIN EDER (B. 1968) Un Paysage avec la Lune (A Landscape with the Moon)

MARTIN EDER (B. 1968) Un Paysage avec la Lune (A Landscape with the Moon) signed and dated ’Martin Eder 05 06’ (upper right); signed, titled and dated ’Un Paysage avec la Lune Martin Eder 05 2006’ (on the reverse) oil on canvas 94O x 70vin. (240 x 180cm.) Painted in 2006

EXHIBITED: New York, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Martin Eder, 2006. Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Martin Eder Der dunkle Grund, 2009, pp. 15, 204 and 317 (illustrated in colour, p. 205). ’In the distance, the moon hangs palely. In a landscape that can be made out only vaguely are anthropomorphic forms like those used by Salvador Dalí. The cool objectivity of paranoid fear. Martin Eder in the environs of Surrealism. Cats are only a pretext’ –R. BERGMANN Spanning nearly two and a half metres in height, Martin Eder’s Un Paysage avec la Lune (A Landscape with the Moon) ofers a vast, fantastical vision. Rendered with rich, tactile brushstrokes, the work combines the dual imagery of household pets and naked human bodies for which the artist is best known. Evoking a variety of painterly genres – from Renaissance portraiture to German Expressionism and Surrealism – Eder is fascinated by the subliminal workings of the human mind. Merging scenes of saccharine innocence with dark eroticism and nightmarish psycho-drama, his works explore our multi-faceted responses to base subjects. ’When I paint, I’m trying to fnd symbols that are very easy to understand’, he explains. ’Kittens, naked asses, faces — these are symbols which we learn to interpret very early. It’s very hard not to fnd a little dog very cute, even if you are very well educated and ironic; at frst you will always fall into this image, because it is anchored in a positive feeling. It’s a fact that our subconscious is very powerful’ (M. Eder, quoted in interview with M. Gnyp, http://www.martineder.com/pdf/ texts/2014/Awakenings_ZOO45_martineder.pdf [accessed 8 August 2017]). Included in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in 2009, the present work seduces the viewer with its fgurative veneer, only to plunge us into a world of twisted associations and warped allusion. Eder delights in these shifting registers: ’it’s exactly the reality that is the disturbing element in my paintings’, he asserts. ’There is no such thing as normality. What you wear, what I wear, what you think is true, what I think is true — it can all be fipped around into something completely diferent at the snap of a fnger. People can change their minds very quickly … We act according to agreements within the group we live in and this is what we consider as normal and what we evaluate as reality’ (M. Eder, quoted in interview with M. Gnyp, http://www.martineder.com/pdf/texts/2014/Awakenings_ ZOO45_martineder.pdf [accessed 8 August 2017]). In the present work, beneath the dim glow of the moon, Eder draws attention to the volatile and frequently conficted nature of visual consciousness.

PROVENANCE: Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Private Collection, Switzerland. Galerie EIGEN+ART, Leipzig/Berlin. Acquired from the above by the present owner.