From 25 July until 8 September 2013, conceptual artist Margret Eicher presents media tapestries in the exhibition “Once Upon a Time in Mass Media” at the Kleine Orangerie am Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin. In these large-format collages, she addresses media images and their social reception in various ways. The chosen form of expression plays a major role, too: tapestries once were tools of (self-) representation of power and authority. In Eicher’s works, too, there are numerous references on war and violence.
In the 1980s, the artist (* 1955 in Viersen) established with the CopyCollage a form of expression that she brought to perfection in her large-scale tapestries: combining motifs from the mass media to new compositions. While in “Experiment 2” she made a connection between medieval alchemy and contemporary weapons, she is seizing on the medial self-display of Iran as missile power in “Genesis 2”: the official press photo, in which numerous missiles ascend towards the sky, quickly turned out to be a digital manipulation.
The missile tests should substantiate the claim to power of this state, as once the tapestries served similar purposes, when they were produced for kings and other sovereigns, especially in France and Belgium. Eicher, too, lets her works being manufactured in Flanders, computer-assisted like the machine-made, mass-produced replicas of valuable carpets.
Irony is pervasive in her visually stunning works, when connotations arise from the medium and the pictured situations: the self-projection of politics, business, sports and show business in their interaction with society. In fact, the media’s power is global, both intended and unintended: which transported reality (or realities) do we perceive, and which fiction is becoming a reality through their medial utilisation? The triviality of many media images is inflated skillfully by Margret Eicher in her work, with the viewer feeling inclined to pay homage to the depicted.
Margret Eicher: Once Upon a Time in Mass Media
26th July – 8 September 2013, Tu-Su 1200-1800h
Admission free
Opening: 25 July 2013, 1800h
Kleine Orangerie am Schloss Charlottenburg
Spandauer Damm 22
14059 Berlin
Berlin
Germany