Margret Eicher works primarily with intricate digital collages produced as large format tapestries woven on a digital loom. Invoking the traditional use of the tapestry as a tool of wealth and power, and commenting on our increasing reliance on digital culture, Eicher fills her tapestries with contemporary icons from our overly mediated age alongside quotations from art history.

“With her media tapestries, Margret Eicher refers directly to the function and effect of the historical tapestry of the 17th century. Since the Middle Ages, tapestries have served representative and political purposes like hardly any other visual medium. In the Baroque era, however, the courtly tapestry unfolded and optimized its functions in the representation of power, in ideological communication and propaganda. If one compares functions of the baroque communication medium with those of contemporary mass media, astonishing parallels emerge. Manipulation of the viewer and philosophical reflection on life stand side by side in a value-neutral manner. Although in the courtly context the propagandistic dispersion and thus the circle of addressees is limited, the intention, method, and effect are structurally similar. In choosing her subjects, Margret Eicher draws from the public image fund of advertising and journalism; of lifestyle magazines or TV series. Combined with set pieces from historical paintings by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Antoine Watteau, or Thomas Gainsborough that correlate in terms of content, they are elaborately digitally processed and finally woven with the aid of computers. By being transformed into a monumental tapestry, the content of the image gains the appearance of legitimacy and power, then as now. The hegemony of advertising media and contemporary information media with their tendencies towards scandalization find a counterpart in this. “Whatever images and visual worlds Eicher appropriates, she relies on one of the basic properties of tapestry to give her pictorial themes a mouthpiece and lend them weight. The tapestry, even if the medium itself is instrumentalized, finds its way back to its original function as a means of communication in the artist’s works and, as a subtle quotation, questions the power of images in today’s world.”

– Katja Schmitz-von Ledebur, Secular Treasury KHM Vienna

In times of ubiquitous virtual user interfaces, artist Margret Eicher tells her visual stories using the “slow” medium of tapestry, which, from the early 15th century until the Rococo period, was an integral part of feudal aristocratic representative furnishings in the form of gobelins. This medium, which today is only found in museums as a representation of courtly claims to power, is catapulted into the present by Eicher’s repertoire of motifs from a variety of media illustrations, yet always remains linked to the media history of images since the early Renaissance period.

The title alludes to Watteau’s famous painting of the same name from 1717. In this work, which is housed in the Louvre, Watteau depicts the journey of various couples to the Ionian island of Kythera, described in Greek mythology as a place of bliss and the sanctuary of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In Watteau’s diction, and entirely in keeping with the tradition of peinture des fêtes galantes he established, this painting is imbued with a significantly soft, fairy-tale atmosphere, which makes it clear that the painter’s work was also about creating a dream image and illustrating the power of poetry. The embarkation for Kythera thus appears as a metaphor for the power of imagination, whose suggestion of an idyllic dream landscape is stronger than reality itself. Margret Eicher’s adaptation of the amorous Kythera myth, based on an advertising motif by the fashion company Dolce & Gabbana, turns the lovers—whose happiness lies in a dreamlike, distant image that never has to become reality because all longing is fulfilled in itself—into a self-referential staging of androgynous, perfect bodies.

The original tapestry Zeus Appears To Eva In The Shape Of A Rocket (2007), and the wallpaper edition shown in this exhibition, refers to the strongly increasing reliance on images in society. It is no longer text and language that primarily shape political, social and individual attitudes, but ubiquitous images whose truth content is usually no longer verified. Invoking academic research in image theory and visual culture alongside quotations from art history, Margret Eicher’s tapestries are about how we think in images. Zeus Appears To Eva In The Shape Of A Rocket is a digital collage assembled from a press photo of a Chinese long-range rocket mounted on a semitrailer and parked in a hangar, embedded within the frame of a Baroque mythical landscape complete with lemurs perched in the heavens and competing for cloud space with winged cupids, gods and goddesses, Lara Croft and soldiers playing video games. Below, in the plane of the border, a reclining female body is seductively intertwined with a python, whose massive coils keep her modesty intact. It is the star model Linda Evangelista, taken from an image advertising the perfume product of a global corporation. She is Eve, become one with the Christian prototype of seduction, the serpent. While Zeus, the king of the gods, transforms himself into a weapon of war to pay homage to her as the ubiquitous symbol of phallic male aggression. This visual allegory, comingling the recognizable tropes of mythology, religion, popular culture and mass media, addresses the most timeless topics since the dawn of mankind: sex and power.