LONDON.- The Line announced the unveiling of Living Spring by the acclaimed Irish sculptor, Eva Rothschild. Standing over four meters tall on the banks of the River Lea at Bow Creek, Living Spring’s branch-like form presents a striking visual counterpoint to the post-industrial landscape of nearby Bow Locks and the imposing Gasometers at Twelvetrees Crescent.
Living Spring comprises slender steel tubes, boldly painted black, red and green in Rothschild’s signature dynamic stripes. Deceptively simple, the work irresistibly draws the viewer in and playfully encourages the eye to trace a meandering line up and down the central axis of the work.
Rothschild commented: ‘Striping forms are something I have used throughout my practice…it segments a continuous form, interrupts how we look at it and keeps us looking a bit longer; an interaction with an object which occurs when we look at art. Public art has long been an important part of my practice and it’s very exciting for me to have my sculpture in the area where I live, work and spend so much time.’
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. Completed in 2011, Living Spring relates to Rothschild's first major public artwork Empire, commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund (also in 2011). Rothschild’s work has developed out of the legacy of the modernist sculptural tradition. Highly defined use of colour and illusionistic materiality are central components of her sculptural lexicon along with humour and an interest in the transcendent possibilities of art.
Megan Piper, Director of The Line said: “Our connection to nature has been heightened across this last year and the youthful vitality of this work, sapling-like at the end of a line of mature trees, holds our attention and encourages us to look again.”
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.
