Eva Rothschild
Living Spring , 2011
Standing at over four metres in height, Living Spring is a slender sculpture composed of striped metal tubes – a recurrent component of Rothschild’s practice. Sited at the end of a line of mature trees, the divergent branch-like form appears like a sapling. Its reference to the natural world is in contrast to Rothschild’s highly controlled use of colour and the precise nature of the cylindrical steel construction, which aligns the piece within a more hard-edged minimalism tradition. Rothschild is interested in the way we give meaning and symbolism to inanimate things and has sometimes described her work as ‘Magic Minimalism’, an idea which can easily be applied to Living Spring.
Courtesy the artist and Modern Art, London
Biography
Eva Rothschild (b.1971, Dublin) studied Fine Art at the University of Ulster, Belfast (1990-93) and Goldsmith’s College, London (1997-99). Her work has developed out of the legacy of the modernist sculptural tradition and a commitment to sculpture’s capacity to create bodily encounters in space. Rothschild works with a wide range of materials including jesmonite, painted steel, leather, wood, tiles and paper. She is interested in how objects acquire meaning extraneous to their material reality with much of her work examining the spiritual investment in objects.
Rothschild made her first large-scale intervention in a museum space in 2009 when she created Cold Corners for Tate Britain’s Duveens Commission – a vast rambling geometric sculpture that occupied the length of the neo-classical galleries. In 2011, she created Empire for the Public Art Fund, New York, placing a monumental, multidirectional steel archway painted with brightly coloured stripes at one of the entrances to Central Park. She has exhibited worldwide, including Hepworth Wakefield (2011) and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2018). In 2014 Rothschild was elected a Royal Academician and in 2019 she represented Ireland at the 58th Venice Biennale. She lives and works in East London.
Images:
1. Megan Piper
2-4. Andrea Capello