Eiko Gröschl: Zephyr

Harkawik is pleased to present Zephyr, an exhibition of sixteen new works by Austrian painter Eiko Gröschl. Here Gröschl offers us a glimpse of a shimmering liminal wonder, a powerful vision situated at the margins of perceptual phenomena. These are “perhiperal skeletons,” constructions that emerge incidentally, and he dredges them out from scraps of canvas strewn across his studio floor. Always developing a larger painting that may or not be exhibited, many of these more modest-scale works are built up by a gentle process of accumulation, and often retain the energy of a scratch left on a wall as a careless visitor scrapes it. Gröschl works via a process of reverse-composition, allowing accidents to guide the formation of intentional marks, creating a wonderful parity between his working methods and that with which he seeks to engage. When we look at his paintings, we see simultaneously the natural world, perceived by a distant observer, or else glimpsed from a rapidly moving vehicle, and the painter encountering it himself. We experience a kind of foregrounded echo; a delicate compression and recapture of those phenomena that are, by definition, fleeting. These paintings are sun burned into retina, mist hovering over lake, lights glinting off a moving wave, or stamen, smashed into felt coat pocket, discovered only when fingers, warmed by a fire, emerge inexplicably yellow. Encountering them is like discovering a mushroom reclaiming a damp log on the forest floor, allowing the eyes to dart over the crest of a black hill, finding, eventually, the precise point at which it meets the sky, or watching a distant laborer bang away at a piece of machinery, knowing an ocean of calamitous noise is locked away in the space between you. Gröschl offers us the kind of truths that only those who have made the trek will see for what they are.