KARLSRUHE.- The ZKM | Karlsruhe is showing works by the Berlin artist Margret Eicher. Titled “Margret Eicher: Digital Worlds,” the solo exhibition includes 15 large format tapestries featuring iconic motifs from our contemporary media reality. The exhibition is in direct proximity and dialog with “zkm_gameplay. the next level,” the ZKM's interactive gaming platform, as well as the presentation of the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe at ZKM. ("Margret Eicher: Digital Worlds” 3.8.-10.11.2024).

Margret Eicher's multi-layered work is characterized by the tension between the courtly medium of the tapestry and the digitally generated collages of motifs from set pieces of the iconography of contemporary gaming and digital culture.

Like their historical models, Eicher’s Work, which she refers to as “Medientapisserien®” (media tapestries) are woven in Flanders using an industrial jacquard process and framed with borders. Fifteen large-format tapestries with motifs of virtual characters from film, science fiction, and computer games are on show as well as the digital watercolours ‘Virtual V.I.P.s’ from the group of works ‘Aquaworld’ (2005) and the installation “Amazing Amazon Stars” (1999). This originates from her “CopyCollages,” a group of works of many years’ standing in which Eicher assembles photographic material into repetitive structures that are potentially infinite.

However, the chief work in the exhibition is the 30-meter-long tapestry “BATTLE:RELOADED” (2022), a work in which Margret Eicher makes reference to the famous Bayeux Tapestry from the 11th century. She uses the sequence of black and white images in this large-scale work to give her contemporary figures, which include Julian Assange, Lara Croft, Lady Gaga, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Lego soldiers, a new life of their own.

Margret Eicher

In the works by Berlin-based artist Margret Eicher (born 1955 in Viersen, DE), Baroque pictorial art meets digital collage and material artistry meets the creation of electronic motifs. From 1973 to 1979, the artist studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Fritz Schwegler and Rolf Sackenheim with a focus on drawing. After completing her studies, however, she turned away from drawing and became part of the Copy Art movement as she developed the technique of CopyCollage, duplicating motifs that are in the public domain by means of ordinary laser copies. Since the early 2000s, the artist has become known for her Medientapisserien® (media tapestries): digital montages of image motifs connected with the information society of the 21st century, which she has produced as woven tapestries. Inside the ornamental borders that frame Margret Eicher’s wall hangings and collages, space and time intertwine: the works move between mystical narratives and complex media worlds in a hybrid manner, skillfully defamiliarizing imagery that the artist appropriates from art history and popular culture, such as film, advertising, and video games. Margret Eicher’s works are thus iconological interpretations of our visual culture, which confirm social theorist Niklas Luhmann’s proposition that “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media.”

Margret Eicher’s oeuvre has been presented in numerous exhibitions. Her most recent solo shows include: DEEP FAKE!, Saxony Palaces and Gardens, Meissen Albrechtsburg Castle, Meissen (2024); BATTLE:RELOADED, Moritzburg Kunstmuseum, Halle (Saale) (2022); Lob der Malkunst, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2021) and Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2020). At ZKM, her works were most recently on show in the exhibitions Writing the History of the Future. The ZKM Collection (2019–22) and Open Codes (2017–19).

4 QUESTIONS TO ALISTAIR HUDSON ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

At your invitation, Margret Eicher is presenting her works for the first time in a comprehensive solo exhibition at ZKM. How did this idea come about?

The ZKM has a long standing relationship with Margret Eicher, her work had been featured in several exhibitions in the past and we have a good number of her works in the ZKM collection. When I first met her last year it was clear that we should acknowledge her work, yet read it in a new context; to situate it alongside our Gameplay exhibition so that there would be a conversation between the popular culture of games and the popular imagery of the artist’s tapestries.

What fascinates you personally about the "media tapestries"?

On the one hand there is an apparent contradiction between the ancient artistic format of weaving with the hybridised pop-digital worlds depicted. Then again there is the natural connection between our digital world and the history of textile production as one of the oldest forms of information recorded and disseminated in patterns and strands of thread. After all it was the mechanisation of textile production in the 19th century that set the course for software development, with hole punched cards employed to ‘programme’ factory looms.

What is the focus of this exhibition?

The focus here is the way digital technologies have evolved the language of ‘world making’ , that is, the imagining and creation of other plausible worlds beyond the one we know right now. Gaming technology has rapidly advanced our ability to make such parallel worlds and ‘inhabit’ them as a means of escape or re-imaging how we might shape or critique our perceived reality. We might think of this as a new phenomenon, but it is firmly routed in the long history of artistic representation in two dimensional forms.

"Margret Eicher. Digital Worlds" makes a direct reference to the neighboring exhibition "zkm_gamepay.the next level". How do you think these two exhibitions communicate with each other?

I think both exemplify the ‘superflat’ attitude to aesthetics, that was really accelerated by the advent of gaming culture, infused with a laissez-faire sensibility towards imagery that was spread principally through the economies of mass market gaming coming out of Japan in the 80s and 90s. Eicher’s work is both high and low art at the same time, fusing folk craft, digital production and heritage artefact. Like all good pop art, there is playfulness and humour that hides a serious commentary on the way we live and imagine ourselves. And ultimately there is a certain pleasure in seeing a Pokémon rendered in medieval form.

Curator: Philipp Ziegler