Eva Rothschild: The Void Presses The Wall art review – Transformative tactile twists
With clashing textures and patterns, Eva Rothschild subverts and shatters expectations to explore themes of physical space and toxic masculinity
Among the hard angles and minimal grid lines, there is softness woven through this tactile show by the Dublin via Glasgow then London-based artist, Eva Rothschild. Her visual vocabulary sings in the Italian accent of the Memphis Group, founded by Ettore Sottsass and active in the 1980s. Rothschild borrows from the collective’s joyful take on design and architecture, using their signature zig zags, squiggles and triangles, but clashing them with tough urban materials: steel, rebar, graffitied breeze blocks made from resin that looks like polystyrene.
Tricks are played on us with textures; the floppy jumpers in ‘Houdini’ are solid after being dipped in resin and the lovers’ padlocks in ‘New Romantix’ are cast from polyurethane rubber, in a vibrant, rainbow Benetton palette. On both floors we find studies of black tones, exploring its slippery, glossy and matte surfaces, curving in licorice knots, sliding floorward in slick paint ribbons. The fabrics of ‘Soft Play’ and ‘The Grit’ look like inviting 90s duvets to roll into. The latter is a towering stack of lushly patterned mattresses, bulging and bending over a stone base; almost hiding the difficulty beneath, it deliberately calls to mind the anti-resilient fairytale of The Princess And The Pea, with its famously delicate protagonist.
‘Safe’ in the Warehouse is a highlight, a film in collaboration with Sadler’s Wells that delights in upending notions of toxic masculinity. We watch a group of young boys dance, hug and swagger over Parsloes Memphis, a yellow sculptural playpark pyramid in Dagenham, based on Rothschild’s memory of a stepped, stone folly in Killiney Hill, Ireland. Glorious.
Eva Rothschild: The Void Presses The Wall, Fruitmarket, until 11 October; picture: Robert Glowacki.