The name Erwin Eisch is inextricably linked to the international studio glass movement, which liberated glass from its purely functional role and transformed it into a material for artistic expression. The possibilities for adding curious ideas to the plastic form are almost endless, but glass also acquires a poetic quality in Eisch's work as a surface for marking or painting.
Power, dedication and a healthy dose of irony
The floating quality of his figures is a stylistic feature of Eisch's art in all areas. It is both an expression of his own sense of space in relation to the earth and the cosmos, and the result of impressions from Baroque murals, which accompanied him from his youth, particularly the example of Franz Anton Rauscher's ceiling painting in the parish church of the Assumption in Frauenau. Alongside this, and equally important, he is and remains a painter and draughtsman. Erwin Eisch is an idiosyncratic painter who, with strength, dedication and a good dose of wit and irony, transports us into a pictorial world that can give us new insights and perspectives. His drawings reveal a complex, superficial humour that is usually already expressed in the title, such as ‘Immer wenn ich blau bin’ (Whenever I'm blue). His paintings are more demanding – they are mostly austere and uncomfortable, they do not impose themselves, but want to be viewed at length and in peace in order to make their own world, the cosmos created by the artist, transparent to us.
