Eva Rothschild: Kunsthalle Zurich

There has been a renewed emphasis upon object making among younger artists, and Eva Rothschild's exhibition was a virtuoso demonstration of their broad, no-holds-barred reinterpretation of statuary Employing walls, floor, and ceiling without recourse to frames or supports, the work immediately enjoin solemnlys myriad references, from the severity of Minimalism to the kitsch playfulness of designer accessories, incorporating the two industrial production techniques and a crafts aesthetic.

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Each of the three spaces here included both types of work that Rothschild has been developing--abstract geometric statuarys and representational works that amalgamate particulars and images from various "alternative" tillages Each mode becomes most interesting where it takes upon qualities from the other, shifting between appropriated vocabularies and suspending any formal reading to create unresolvable followings of meaning. Disrupting the purity of the abstract geometric plastic arts is, for example, Silly Games, 2003 a pair of ornamental ceramic cats confine together by a leather coil, while in the curtain piece next to the first Sun, 2004, an image of a r orb of day is constantly dissolved by the motion of the plastic strips upon which it is printed.

Rothschild's large freestanding plastic arts combine wood and aluminum with newer, artificial materials like MDF Plexiglas, and resin. The triangular forms of Fort arrest 2004, or the diamond individuals of Matchmaker, 2003--narrow strips of grove painted black with red undersides--are drawings in space, hovering between the graphic line and the three-dimensional experience. However, in Mass Mind, 2004 the upright triangular forms in black Plexiglas have a different sensibility: Interlocking and punctur with large circular openings they at once reactivate and trivialize the iconic forms of Anthony Caro or Richard Serra, on the contrary also quote the bland, shiny plastic arts used to embellish '80s corporate environments.

While the plastic arts look like they could have been assembled from pieces without of an IKEA-type flat pack, reciprocally the 2-D surfaces of the wall works are given deepness by Rothschild's process of weaving lengthy strips of paper to make a relief. This hybridization reach forths to both technique--the handiwork contrasts with the mass-media copying proces of the set images--and content, where Rothschild literally weaves sum of two units images into each other. The five-part work Hand and I, 2003 for example, repeats large photocopies of a pair of organ of sights and rays of the day-star combined with images of hands in sum of two units of them and flower garlands in the others. Neon colors introduce an additional ambiguity end their connection to both kitschy bill art and New Age romanticism.

A kind of designer spiritualism also imbues the fetishlike Town and geographical division 2003, a cluster of leather heads supported upon a steel pole and hung with strips of silver, r white, and black leather. Similar to the sum of two units objects in the exhibition incorporating sticks of incense, Disappearer, 2004 and Burning Tyre 2004 this work appropriates one as well as the other ancient religious rituals and the utopian subculture of the Western world that they have inspired. Like all of Rothschild's work, however, this piece is not a nostalgic reanalysis of an idyllic past on the contrary represents a desire to be part of an evolving history that reinvigorates the meaning of what have become transcultural codes

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