Eiko Gröschl: Zephyr
5538 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
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.
Eiko Gröschl Born in 1992 in Gratz, Austria Lives and works in Vienna Born in 1992 in Gratz, Vienna based artist Eiko Gröschl is a 2019 graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Eiko has taken part in recent solo and two person exhibitions throughout Austria and the Czech Republic with Zaazrak Dornych, Chari Dorotheergasse, okay works, Charim Schleifmühlgasse, and fAN. Eiko’s muted, almost sun-stained canvases often depict the remnants of an industrial empire: an untitled 2019 work reveals a near-barren hillside which contains a single building, its base partially erased from the canvas. In his conscious “un-doing” the image, Gröschl perhaps suggests how our own self-destructive habits will manifest in nearby futures. Recent exhibitions include “Some paintings from Eiko G” (2022, Zaazrak Dornych); “Fragile Phantom” (2022, Malerische Berührungen); and “Wie man sich anschaut” (2022, Chari Dorotheergasse).