The exhibition presents a group of intimately scaled paintings depicting moments drawn from the visual and temporal landscape of recent cinema. Within this collection of works, Eichwald’s delicately painted canvases allude to passages from films including My Own Private Idaho and Brokeback Mountain. This trove of fleeting filmic moments is intercut with images referencing the recent albums of Lorde and Sabrina Carpenter. Together, the paintings reflect on ideas of identity and gender; impermanence and loss.

“The making of Eichwald’s work proceeds, literally, from stopped time. Eichwald finds inspiration from screenshots she takes while watching movies on her laptop, the accumulation of which constitutes an archive indexing her conceptual and aesthetic inclinations in, say, any given month. More esoterically, Eichwald’s paintings critically engage the desire for the simplicity of bygone days and rural life characteristic of the pastoral tradition, in which virtue is found not in the heroic but in the humble. As Thomas Crow has written, the pastoral allows a distinctive voice to be constructed from the contrast between large artistic ambitions and an awareness of our limited horizons and modest powers. In the current landscape of critical discourse (and figurative painting), which exalts embodied and identitarian experience, Eichwald’s paintings share in the larger preoccupation with experiences that have been historically undervalued, or which “enlightenment” values and its afterlives have cast aside. Eichwald proposes a temporality that accommodates itself to other ways—whether spiritual or otherwise non-normative—of being in the world.” Elizabeth Buhe, The Brooklyn Rail.

The scale of many of Eichwald’s works approaches the historical tradition of miniatures—paintings made to be worn within lockets or stowed in a pocket, to keep an image of a loved one close before the age of photography. As with these works, Eichwald’s paintings are to be experienced at close range, almost insisting on one viewer at a time. Like paging through a book of illustrations, these works cannot be experienced all at once. They form their own microverse of conjured imagery, offering a view into the bell jar.

“Eichwald’s paintings emerge from the thresholds of girlhood, not as biography, but as atmosphere. She moves between fragments—Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, Winona Ryder chain-smoking in Reality Bites, Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty. The references aren’t nostalgic, they’re talismanic. Not about the past, but about projection: how it feels to idolise someone, or want to be someone else, or imagine yourself as a silhouette in someone else’s fantasy. She doesn’t want the boy, she wants the yearning. The fandom is the feeling. In Eichwald’s world, pleasure doesn’t resolve, it hovers. The aesthetic of love becomes an end in itself, where the yearning is more real than any touch.” Cassie Beadle, “Like Lovers Do”