Barbara Eichhorn-Wenzel Ziersch
Barbara Eichhorn was born in 1965 in Freising, Germany. She studied upholstery, painting and graphic design at the Fine Arts School in Vienna. She lives and works in Vienna. As she says herself, “I draw what is in front on me”. Her intimate charcoal drawings of people close to her or leafy woods are based on photographs, either taken by herself or cut out of newspapers and magazines, and she uses them as a sort of notebook for her artistic drawings. Most of Barbara Eichhorn’s work is on paper, but in recent years she has specialised in drawing directly on walls. One example is the recent drawing she made on the walls of Mass MOCA, North Adams, USA, on the occasion of her exhibition Uncommon Denominator. The fact that she uses the wall as a large canvas to draw her landscapes and woods provides her with the possibility of endowing them with a magnificence and grandeur that she would not achieve on paper. For this exhibition Barbara Eichhorn will make a site specific work on the wall of the Sala de la Muralla. This installation will be accompanied by a selection of her drawings. Wenzel Ziersch This is the first exhibition dedicated to this artist, born in Munich in 1965, not only in Spain but in a museum anywhere in the world. Wenzel Ziersch does not draw: he writes the surfaces of his paintings. In his tiny writing, the shades and hues little by little form shapes in his paintings. Drawing with writing, he meticulously and carefully repeats fragments of texts over and over again, formerly items taken from newspapers and now passages from the Bible, on paper, canvas, mirrors or panes of glass to form almost monochrome surfaces where blacks, greys and whites gently blend. The titles of some of his series are suggestive, for example, The Word was Painting or Inscriptions. In them he painstakingly and with almost monkish perseverance transcribes passages of the book of Corinthians. Using a fine pencil or a steel burin, which he “bandages” to protect his hands, he writes, or scrapes on glass, the same sentence over and over again until the whole surface of the painting is covered by a text impossible to read. The exhibition held at the IVAM will include a selection of twenty works on different media (glass, paper, wood) made in pencil, felt pen, ink