26/11/2015 - 30/11/2015
RijksakademieOpen
Together Eva Spierenburg’s paintings, objects and videos constitute a kind of archeological site of the Garden of Eden. It doesn’t offer an experience of Paradise though. Digging deep into genesis stories and images, Spierenburg finds death, vulnerability and ancestral remains. Meanwhile she explores her personal relationship to the transient body, to the mother and the father, to female and male.
Spierenburg's own body is very much present in her new works. She almost literally reveals herself in a video. She smashes the plaster armor she’s wearing, as if it were a ritual act. the essential one is similarly ritually charged: a bust of a woman pinned on a stick, her breasts dangling underneath the shoulders. The stick is leaning against the wall, but also invites to being carried around as a portable totem. In the series he is actually me Spierenburg dresses herself up as a man, wearing a beard made of her own hair. In this new role she re-enacts all the men in her paintings from 2014 in order to explore to what extent she has painted a male alter ego for herself.