Carolin Eidner. Thousand Suns for a Lonely Man

Carolin Eidner
Thousand Suns for a Lonely Man

The work of Carolin Eidner (*1984 in Berlin, lives in Düsseldorf), who completed her studies in Düsseldorf with Rosemarie Trockel, focuses on the relationship between conceptual and p hysical aspects of objects and materials. Eidner’s artistic practice is therefore distinguished by a broad spectrum of media, techniques, and approaches as well as an unusual use of diverse materials. The exhibition at the Langen Foundation comprises some twenty-five works, of which most were produced especially for the exhibition. All the works are part of the two most recently created groups of works: Wall objects of pigmented plaster are juxtaposed with floor sculptures of coloured glass and glass-cerami c panels.

In Carolin Eidner’s exhibition, two groups of works encounter one another, and in their dissimilarity show how specifically the artist selects and appropriates materials. As a result of her interest in preserving the openness of a “beginner spir it”, as it is called in Zen Buddhism, Eidner again and again explores unfamiliar paths and creates situations that lead her into previously unknown terrain. In doing so, she develops in part complex processes, as in the case of the plaster works. In them, Eidner mixes plaster powder, water, and pigments to create a fast- drying mass that she – as in the case of painting by colours – fills into the contoured fields that constitute the motif. Eidner’s technique is additive in a different way in the case of the floor sculptures . H ere, she layers glass and glass ceramic panels of various sizes and colours over one another to create a constructive unit. The intensive colourfulness of these sculptures also contrasts with the reserved, pastel colour shades to which the white of the plaster gives rise in the wall works, while the technical aesthetic of the panels with their smooth, reflective surfaces contrasts with the visibly fabricated quality of the plaster objects.

Examining materials and the work processes deriv ed from them serve Carolin Eidner as a means to create enigmas from symbols, to code materials anew, and thus make reference to spaces of possibility beyond established regimes. Inspired by this, with the plaster works, the artist invokes the concept of si ngularity. In the field of future studies, the technical singularity denotes that moment as of which progress becomes accelerated to such an extent that the artificial intelligence of machines gives rise to cognitive possibilities that exceed human horizon s. The empty spaces in Eidner’s works open up to these potentials beyond our ideas and categories of thought.