Margret Eicher – Emphasis on the digital fantasy world

Margret Eicher's large-format media tapestries, which she has been creating for about twenty years, are located at the interface of material artworks and the electronic noise of the digital sphere. Her digital montages are produced as large-format tapestries in a digitally operating jacquard weaving mill. The found, public photographic (pre-)image is the starting point of Eicher's visual language. In her montages, she processes trivial contemporary images and clichés from magazines and the Internet. Current events and the image of mankind are reflected in the garish, mendacious beauty of high-end surfaces, feeding inexorably our consciousness and attitude to life. Eicher counters this totality of media photos: through appropriation, new placement as well as contentual and artistic re-contextualization. The pictorial form of the noble, courtly jacquard weaving or tapestry chosen by the artist literally weaves a contemporary image of an event under her direction: catastrophes, portraits, figural scenes and personalities from the media world leave their fleeting triviality while taking on a typifying character, historicised and "sacralised" through the medium of tapestry. The work It's a Digital World 1 plays with the borderline between the subconscious and fiction, staged by the underwater and the surface. The two worlds are reversed here: the "real" girl busy with the electronic device is below the water surface, while the fictional action with the superhero Hulk takes place above.

 

Margret Eicher (b. 1955) studied fine arts at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1973 to 1979. Since then she has held national and international solo and group exhibitions, and received various scholarships and awards. Her works can be found in many collections such as the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Kunsthalle Mannheim, ZKM Karlsruhe, Museum Bochum and the Erarta Museum in St. Petersburg. The Kunstmuseum Moritzburg dedicated a solo exhibition to her in 2022. Eicher lives and works in Berlin, Mannheim and Düsseldorf.