Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York is proud to announce Scream In My Throat, its first solo exhibition with Julia von Eichel, featuring high-energy sculptural works and drawings that push the physical limits of materials.
The sculptures featured in Scream In My Throat are predominantly monochromatic, but they are anything but austere. Built by stretching silk over skeletal structures of wood, thread, and Wiffle Balls, the wall-mounted sculptures appear to fold out into the space, peeling away from the wall. Color is picked up from the bright plastic balls beneath the white silk as well as from the light and color of the surrounding space. The points and ridges of the structure create shadows within a frenetic landscape across the work. The materials are difficult to work with, and the struggle to wrap these impossible, prickly objects with delicate silk is a manifestation of von Eichel’s own struggle to wrap her mind around a great personal loss. The works are violent, fraught negotiations between her vision for the piece and the materials. The silk is stretched to its physical limit, barely containing the angry, skeletal structure within.
This same erupting quality is found in the bright bursts of color of von Eichel’s abstract drawings of oil pastel and graphite on Mylar. Here, color is not restrained, and is used dynamically to express motion and tension. Von Eichel’s drawings evoke the energy of neurons firing: they feel bodily and electrically charged. Scream In My Throat expresses the anxious, latent energy we humans feel when pushed to our physical and emotional limits.
Julia von Eichel was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland and currently resides and works in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the Corcoran School of the Arts, Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and School of Visual Arts, New York, from which she received her BA in Sculpture. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including those at the DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Jay Grimm Gallery, New York, NY; Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, NY; Lucien Terras, New York, NY; and Addison Ripley Gallery, Washington, DC. Her works are in many public collections including the John W. Hechinger, Sr. Collection, Washington, DC; Goldman Sachs, New York; Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington; and the Ritz Carlton, New York. Von Eichel’s works have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Daily News Tribune, Phillips Art Expert, and Artillery Magazine.
