...and she´s every girl you´ve seen in every movie every dame you´ve ever known on late-night TV in her steam and steel is the passion you feel endlessly New York is a woman she´ll make you cry and to her you´re just another guy
- Suzanne Vega
New York is a woman. On her album 'Beauty & Crime', released in 2007, the American musician Suzanne Vega sings about a young man from the suburbs succumbing to the fascination of a beautiful woman from Manhattan during a prolonged business trip to New York. The natural elegance, effortless coolness and intellectual stance but also the vulnerability of New York women have repeatedly been of interest to writers, musicians, film-makers, photographers and painters. Characters like Holly Golightly from Truman Capote's 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' have embedded themselves into our collective memory just as much as Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte - the confident career women from the American TV series 'Sex and the City', which also enjoys tremendous popularity in this country.
Over the last few years, the Munich-based painter Charlotte Eschenlohr has frequently chosen the New York metropolis as a place of residence to press ahead with her artistic production in a temporary studio. The city of New York, with its fast-paced rhythm, its intensity, its rapidly changing moods and sometimes also its social hardship has played a major part in her work. However, encounters with people from the city were just as important to the painter.
In preparation for her painting, Charlotte Eschenlohr seeks out the most diverse places, which she photographs and illustrates. These can be distinctive landmarks in the city, like the heavy steel construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which spans the East river. Or perhaps the window display of a hip design shop in Soho. Then again inspiring artistic places, like the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Lower East side. Such urban highlights take turns in the artist's picture cosmos with other initially rather seemingly unspectacular pictures of everyday life, such as a fenced in front garden in the artists' district Williamsburg or a Chinese man, who is sitting on a park bench.
However, for Charlotte Eschenlohr, one particularly important driving force for artistic exploration is working with a female model. This regularly results in intensive dialogs between the artist and her models, who are at home in the city where the artist just happens to work at the time. She always approaches her models spontaneously, intuitively and objectively. During sittings, she takes photos, creates illustrations, drawings, collages and sometimes even already straightaway a painting.
During several stays in New York over the last few years, Charlotte Eschenlohr has produced a whole host of paintings, in which the modern, self-determined and attractive urban woman appeared as a contemporary independent protagonist. This complex of works is now flowing into a multi-faceted block, in which she condenses the study of the metropolis, the female image in the city of New York and the self-reflection about her own presence in the city on the Hudson River into a complex all-over.
Her main work 'New York Patterns', created during 2008-2009, consists of 22 wood panels, each measuring 110 x 78 cm. Attached to the panels are photographs, which were subsequently painted over. Charlotte Eschenlohr took the photographs herself during her excursions through New York. The primary layer of every single picture consists of a repeating photographic grid. The grid is alternately made up of nine, twelve, 15 or 16 identical photos. The structure of the block is determined by a serial approach and changing rhythm, which makes it come alive. This picture carpet composed of many pieces of a jigsaw is made up of complex layers, with observations painted over and the lively juxtaposition of different motives, some fed by earlier paintings of the artist. Onto this detailed base, the artist places her protagonists, a type of woman that can be found in many of her paintings: the urban woman as a nude model, posing and acting in a relaxed manner. Sometimes the model is adorned with casual accessories like a cowboy hat, sometimes she is shown as a reading intellectual with an open newspaper in her hand, and then again one can see her high heels, worn fetish-like for show.
The study of the female nude model has a long tradition in art history. A lot has been published about the complex relationship between the male painter and his female model. Be it Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Pablo Picasso - the list of painters working intensively with nude models could be continued endlessly over many centuries. But if one takes a look at the few female artists in whose works female nudes play a major role, one discovers that Charlotte Eschenlohr's approach to work does not have very many forerunners. During the 20s, the Polish art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) enjoyed great success with her equally coolly elegant and sensual representation of modern women. The decoratively attired beauties drive racy cars, move in the elegantly styled ambience of a city or display their unconcealed female charms with self-confidence.
In photography, the French artist Bettina Rheims is known for her erotically charged female look at the body of members of the same sex. Rheims says: "I take photographs of women for women. I would never force my models to do anything that I would not be prepared to have done with me." The primacy emphasized thus by Rheims of a partnership among women surely also applies to the works of Charlotte Eschenlohr. And it's this that makes the crucial difference: The female look at the female body is not hierarchical. The recurring social asymmetry in art history between the frequently older male painter and his young model - often from more humble backgrounds and economically dependent on the painter - does not come across in this case.
The fact that the occupation with the female artist's eye is at present high on the agenda once again is demonstrated by the current exhibition focus in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. For an entire year - from May 2009 to May 2010, the museum of modern art is presenting solely female artists from their own collection under the title 'Elles@Centrepompidou'.
Another major female painter repeatedly occupied herself with portraits of women at the turn of the century. However, the earthy figures of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) from Worpswede are no city heroines. Although Paula Modersohn-Becker spent a number of influential years in Paris during her chequered history, her portraits reflect a rather calm inwardness and the intense feeling of a world-weary individual of being thrown back onto one's own resources. Both are explained powerfully by this painter's own inner turmoil.
It's an entirely different story with Charlotte Eschenlohr. Her painting is expressive, avant-garde and emerging. She works against resistance, and counters occasional problems with her chosen locations with powerful artistic gestures and explosions. Restriction provokes productive work, setbacks encourage a thirst for action.
During a stay in Rome in spring 2009, this basic optimistic fighting spirit resulted in an entirely new body of work. Charlotte Eschenlohr also worked part-time in a studio in the city shaped by ancient grandeur. Exploration and investigative roaming through the city on the Tiber and working with female nude models once again formed the basis of her artistic creation. In Rome, the artist registered the striking differences between the pulsating US metropolis New York and the 'eternal city' in Italy. The differently perceived concept of freedom among people, especially women, the different basic pulse of the two cities, and the sharp contrast between the antique buildings in old Europe and the futuristic skyscraper architecture in the new world, became crystal clear to her very quickly. Naturally, this had an effect on the new paintings of Charlotte Eschenlohr. She dealt intensively with typically Roman subjects. This resulted in intensely colorful landscape pictures, painted freely from sketches made in the park of the Villa Doria Pamphilij, the green lungs in the west of Rome. The painter also found motives for a number of interior paintings here, such as 'Fontana'. It shows a seemingly tired looking fish on a fountain sculpture in the interior of the Villa Doria Pamphilij, with water spouting out of its mouth. The artist interprets this classic motive rather trendily, by cheekily mixing it up with white accents and a heavy gold décor.
But in Rome, Charlotte Eschenlohr also devoted her time once more to the figure of the enlightened woman in a big city. Various models and female types make their debut in the explosively dynamic paintings. They brace themselves freely and daringly against the walls of the city. They break out and they dictate the rules of the game themselves. But hard fought freedom can hit barriers.
The painting "Marne with Red Bag" shows a female nude. The body is only partly visible; the figure is cut off above the private parts. When the vulva is exposed, the body appears vulnerable. In her right hand, the young woman is holding a red handbag, which she extends sideways from the body, almost flauntingly. Exhibitionism, vulnerability and endured brutality seem to be displayed here. At the same time, the figure conveys a proud posture of not letting events get her down, with legs defiantly pressed together stuffed into high-heeled shoes. The painting is neither romantic nor anatomically accurate. It is emotional and expressive, and it shows the character in a vulnerable situation. The painter Charlotte Eschenlohr does not work with the concealing fig leaf.
For some time now, the artist has regularly used materials found to produce collages and drawings as picture carriers in what almost seem to be little finger exercises. Charlotte Eschenlohr hit upon articles in junk shops in Brooklyn and at flea markets in Rome. She collected decorative American wrapping paper from the 50s, which she repeatedly uses as a background for portrayals of women. In Rome, she found a range of marble effect papers, produced in the old tradition of qualified craftsmen, but also paper with decorative patterns used to wrap fruit. The artist uses all of these paper materials found for her new collages, as well as cutouts from her own photographs, which she puts together to entirely new graphic landscapes by pasting them on top of each other in several layers, ready to be painted over and turned into a collage. The different female characters also appear regularly here, often playful and saucy, for instance a nude as cheeky decoration in a Campari glass - an allusion to the provocative productions by the American new burlesque dancer Dita von Teese. Dolce vita with side effects.
The exploration of femininity in different countries runs persistently through the paintings and drawings of Charlotte Eschenlohr. Her project 'part-time studio', up to now with stopovers in New York, Berlin and Rome, has by far not reached its conclusion. From her base in Munich, the artist is planning more temporary stays in European and American cities. Experiments and confrontations, new impressions and resistance, new places and new people form the starting point for further artistic explorations. New York is a woman. Rome is not always an open city. The artistic landscape still offers many new destinations.
Nicole Büsing & Heiko Klaas
6.9.2009
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