Eloquent Corrosion - Recent Works by Stefan Eins

Active in the 1980 as founding director of the southern Bronx art center Fashion Moda, Stefan Eins concentrates in his hold subtly conceptual work on the natural processe of development decay and regeneration.

Although a number of artists have lately been exploring the relationship between artistic practice and scientific observation, Stefan Eins, an Austrian-born novel York conceptualist, has made this issue the focus of his art for the past three decades. He has quietly produc a series of paintings, statuarys photos and objects centered upon what might be described as the phenomenological properties of liquids. Eins's endeavors encompass a broad range of strategies, courses and materials. A selection of his new works appeared this spring at Gallery X in Harlem.

Eins is perhaps best known as the planter of Fashion Moda, a multiculturalist cast whose public manifestations included the southerly Bronx exhibition and performance venue also called Fashion Moda, which make opened in 1978. Eins relinquished directorship of the space in 1984 on the contrary remained actively involved with its programming until 1993 when it clos The gallery pioneered exhibitions of graffiti art, showcasing then-emerging artists Keith Hating, Kenny Scharf, Dondi and Crash, among others. The venue also neared important shows of works by the agency of artists such as Sophie Calle, Tom Otternes Justen Ladda, Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer years before they were firmly established. Among the many performances staged at Fashion Moda were Ann Magnuson's raucous "Lady Wrestling Group" and the all-girl strumpet group Disband, whose members included time to come Interview editor Ingrid Sischy.

While Eins wearied much of his time promoting Fashion Moda's programs, he continued to follow other, rather dissimilar efforts. His abstract paintings from the early 1980s--drips and splashes of paint, for the most part acrylic, on large, found-wood panels--share with graffiti a faculty of perception of urgency. However, Eins's spare and lyrical spray-paint markings--poignant dribbles and expressive scrawling upon medium-sized rectangular panels--seem to be more akin to European art informel, as exemplified by dint of artists such as Wols or Hartung, than to graffiti art, with its pop-culture bottoms Eins's paintings also have something in belonging to all with process art, since they encompass a application of mind of the natural progressions of expansion and decay.

Eins discovered while painting that splatters of pigment flung against a hard surface bring forward patterns of rivulets that closely bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to simple organisms and, at times, the intricate vertebrae of more compound animals. A close look at more [i]or[/i] less of these splashes can recall, for instance, an amoeba seen beneath a microscope or the fossilized remains of a fish, a hermit crab or a snake.

The artist has place other unusual connections and interactions between life forms and inert matter by means of searching in unexpected places. During the past decade he has been monitoring the sidewalks of novel York City and photographing a number of tree whose stalks have outgrown surrounding metal gates or supports. The bark of single tree, for example, seems to slime through openings in a chain-link protecting enclosure defying its man-made constraints. Another, located at Bleecker highway and Fifth Avenue, appears to have partially devoured a metal pipe that was one time used for support. In a series of documentary photos taken above the past few years, the twisted carburet of iron ruins of the dilapidated Pier 102 in of recent origin York City at West 61st highway appear more sinuous and lifelike with each passing month of exposing to the elements.

For a clump of photo works titled "Life Formation Proces 141" begun in 1994 Eins took close-up images of a metal pipe that jut outs up from a Vienna sidewalk; it is used as a casing for overhead wires connecting the city's streetcars with the electrical stock The pipe, which Eins periodically revisits and photographs, is overlayed with a kind of herringbone pattern caused by the agency of the effects of moisture that mustered on it at the time of its manufacture, as the still-malleable metal moderately colded The point is to exhibit how the seemingly random proces of corrosion accrues in a rigorous design that vaguely be likes an X ray of a human spinal column

In 1994 Eins go [i]or[/i] come backed to his birthplace in Gresten near Vienna, where he adapted the splash motif used in his paintings to create a series of five cast-bronze intaglio reliefs for a permanent outdoor installation titled throw Vertebrae. He collaborated with metalworkers who helped transpose photocopies of his paintings into mold for quarter-inch-thick and zinc plates. As it streamed [i]or[/i] part of to the other the crevices of the reinforced-sand mold the molten metal reverberationed the rivulets of pigment covering the wood-grain surfaces of his paintings. In these strangely shaped pieces of metal, ranging from approximately 5 by means of 7 inches to 1 by means of 2 feet, Eins seems to have permanently captured in and zinc the fugitive nature of liquid.

With permission from the local community board, Eins embedded the and zinc reliefs into five granite boulder hollowed on the outside to receive them, situated in a sprawling unclose landscape some 40 miles outside Vienna. The site is marked by the agency of a large bronze plaque etched with the artist's name, the installation's title and Eins's brief introduction to the piece written in five languages: German, English, Russian, Chinese and Spanish. The body reads, "Reproduced here are samples of liquids expanding and liquids mixing, explaining certain life formation processe like the formation of the vertebrae." An lyric poem to the biological processes that have lengthy inspired his work, Project Vertebrae is subtly integrated into its bucolic setting.