MARTIN EDER
my blood is honey
December 7 through January 25, 2002
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Martin Eder. The artist’s previous solo shows include Galerie Eigen+Art, Berlin in 2002 and Stadtische Kunstsammlung, Augsburg in 2001. In 2003, he will have a one-person exhibition at the Kunstverein Potsdam. He has been included in many group exhibitions including PS1, Long Island City, Arndt & Partner, Berlin, Annat Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and the Barbican Center, London. This will be his first solo show in New York.
In Martin Eder’s work beauty and morbidity are close bedfellows. He embraces an aesthetic that is part horror-movie theatricality and part glittering seduction to describe an artificial value system and its accompanying world of loss.
For this show, Eder splits the gallery into one central stall surrounded by corridors. He partitions the space with shimmering plastic curtains that invoke a decrepit glamour and covers the floor with industrial plastic wrap that is at once banal and sinister. On the walls he has written a disembodied line of poetry in red gothic lettering:
but nothing I see
nothing
Directly on this, he displays watercolors from his ongoing series “The Undead—Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.” Here small kittens and naked girls are dreamily rendered on grounds of fluid color—representations from a glossy world of unrealized expectations and displaced desire.
In the interior space of the gallery Eder presents my blood is honey, a DVD projection starring him lying in his bathtub coughing up blood. This gruesome performance is based on an actual episode of illness after an excessive night-life experience in Berlin. my blood is honey questions the sweetish, winking promise of happiness born from our power fantasies and how much we are willing to pay for it.
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is located at 504 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. The gallery will be closed December 22 – January 3. For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery by telephone at (212) 633-6555, fax at (212) 367-9502, or email fredreicksfreiser@nyc.rr.com. Visit us at the end of the month at our new Website fredericksfreisergallery.com.