University of São Paulo: MAC Exhibition Offers Glimpse into Eleonore Koch’s Inner World
USP’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) presents the exhibition Eleonore Koch: Em Cena , curated by professor Fernanda Pitta. There are 190 works by the naturalized Brazilian artist, known for her paintings of landscapes, interiors and still lifes with attention to composition and color.
Of German-Jewish origin, Eleonore Koch (Berlin, 1926-São Paulo, 2018) was a child when her family fled Nazism and settled in São Paulo. Many of her paintings depict spaces without human presence, such as a setting before or after the consummation of a scene. Koch painted with tempera, a technique that guaranteed the purity of color on the canvas, and allowed the artist to explore contrasts and tensions. She produced many versions of a theme, changing only elements and colors, resulting in the production of different sensations in the audience with each variation.
The exhibition is divided into four sections: The Scene , Interiors , The Importance of the Object and The Method . The structure references cinema, one of Lore’s passions, as the artist was also known. “The first room has landscapes, a kind of panoramic view. Then the interiors, which are the medium shots, and the still lifes, the details; there are three types of ‘take’”, explains Fernanda Pitta, who has been researching the artist for over ten years. “ The Method brings the idea of editing: through studies, we can see how she assembles and composes scenes.”
Koch worked in set design and was a staunch film buff. In the archive, albums from the 1940s to 1990 show clippings of films she watched. The curatorship explored the work’s dialogue with seventh art and how films impacted its artistic method and language. “There is a cinematographic look in the way the scene is composed: the framing, the points of view, the relationship between the panoramic view and the detail”, points out Fernanda. For her, Eleonore Koch’s sensitivity resembles that of an eye trained by cinema to see images.
In the exhibition, the absence of human presence draws attention. The only two canvases are portraits of the children of Alfredo Volpi , an icon of Modernism who served as a “mentor” to Eleonore at the beginning of her career as a painter. The artist painted objects and landscapes, using the same elements in several works. The same palm tree appears in landscapes of Rio de Janeiro, Egypt and California, as in a collage. “They reappear as characters in the silent cinema of her work”, expresses Fernanda Pitta. The artist’s method was repetition with color variations, thus creating different contrasts.
For André Maia, a History student, visiting the exhibition, the strength of the color was the first impression of the exhibition. “It’s very different in person, it has depth. It’s something to see live,” he says.
Even as the decades pass, the same furniture returns, alone or in pairs, with varying colors, in solitary rooms, in Eleonore Koch’s paintings. Interior painting ( Zimmerbilds ) was popularized among the European bourgeoisie in the 17th century, but, from the 19th century onwards, artists began to express their subjectivity through objects. This is the case with Eleonore’s interiors: Fernanda points out that they are not just represented objects, but agents and characters in her life. “They are taken seriously and have a presence, they are important signs of an experience,” she comments. “The idea that Eleonore’s painting is solitary is curious. She is permeated with life: a life mediated by the things that are in her daily life, full of memories and souvenirs.”
For André Maia, uninhabited spaces awaken curiosity and imagination: the instinct is to imagine what “scene” would take place there. For Pedro Menezes, a Literature student, also visiting the exhibition, Eleonore’s appreciation for the common and everyday stands out. “At first, I found it strange that there were no people,” he says. “But what is hers says a lot about her. As an artist, she reveals herself through the things she records; and there’s a lot of it there.”
Associating elements and color relationships, Eleonore Koch generates works that are distinct from each other, transforming the reaction to the painting. Fernanda Pitta considers that the objective is not reliable representation, but rather the synthesis of a vision. “This is the main focus of her painting: thinking about the sensations that colors cause through painting. Not surprisingly, she uses the tempera technique.” Tempera dates back to medieval art; a pigment is combined with a binder, such as water or egg yolk. “With the purity of the color, she experiments with these mixtures in the compositions and studies the variations with great variety”, explains the curator.
Lore Koch, “Volpi’s only disciple”
In obituaries, the artist was identified as the only disciple of Alfredo Volpi. Her career remained related to the figure of the modernist, even after becoming independent. She learned the tempera technique from Volpi, but developed her own recipe, which is now part of the collection of the Conservation and Restoration Center of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. Her study of color took her on a different path; his meditative and introspective painting puts more emphasis on contrasts, explains Fernanda Pitta. The curator considers that Eleonore needs to be recognized for her specificities so that her work can truly be seen.
Eleonore’s works dialogue with the concretist movement, but she does not fit into a specific artistic current. Fernanda considers that the lack of recognition for her in life was due to her figure being linked to Volpi, due to the issue of gender and because she did not fit into the great “debates” that the historiography of art in Brazil was dedicated to analyzing. In the discussion between abstractionism and figurativism, Lore Koch followed his own path. She emancipates herself from Volpi when she moves to Rio de Janeiro and begins to represent landscapes and increase the scale of her paintings. When she goes to England, she devotes herself entirely to painting and experiments with bolder color combinations, defining her characteristic style. “It is from this moment that the issue of serialization and repetition is observed more systematically”, comments Fernanda about the artist’s production from the 1960s onwards.
Even though it does not belong to a particular aspect, Eleonore Koch’s work is in dialogue with that of other artists of her time, mainly those belonging to the collection of her curator, Theon Spanudis. The influence of British pop artists from the 1960s and 1970s encouraged the serialization of her paintings during her time in England, where she lived between the late 1960s and the 1980s. Another reference was Josef Albers, author of The Interaction of Colors . “It brings to everyday life how color permeates our daily lives”, expresses Fernanda Pitta. Melancholy, affection, sensitivity, memory, affection and the importance given to objects that represent memories give density to the work. “This has to do with Eleonore’s own experience with the life in exile that she has always lived. This very cerebral form of painting ends up gaining the character of experience through colors”, says the curator.
A new look
MAC has been programming the Em Cena exhibition for two years, but the historical review is the result of a decade of research by Fernanda Pitta. The interest in Eleonore Koch came from the variety generated from methodical repetition, as well as the way the artist updates painting to deal with contemporary themes. Even with an extensive and thought-provoking work, the artist is little studied and known. With this retrospective exhibition, the museum seeks to present Eleonore Koch to a wider audience and encourage a review of this production. “The history of art and painting in Brazil gave us little space to look at productions like hers”, says Fernanda Pitta.
The MAC is the public museum with the most works by the artist. Curator Theon Spanudis donated his collection to the museum. For the exhibition, works were loaned from the São Paulo Museum of Art (Masp), the Pinacoteca and the Museum of Modern Art (MAM). But the highlight is the artist’s personal archive, systematically organized with photographs, correspondence, newspaper clippings and personal documents. Koch’s heirs donated her estate so that research can be developed based on the artist’s work.
With a large number of works by the artist, MAC aims to understand her production process through comparison. Eleonore Koch will be one of the case studies at the museum’s Multi-User Heritage Science Center – in the development phase -, where technical analyzes will be carried out using X-Ray, infrared and ultraviolet, among others. It is a collaboration with professor Márcia Rizzutto, from the USP Physics Institute, who has already researched the materiality of works at Masp and the Museu Paulista.
Fernanda Pitta’s goal is for the public to discover and be touched by Eleonore Koch’s work. “Some people identify with certain objects or landscapes and are able to establish a relationship. She counts on that – the fact that things talk to people. But she is aware that it is not a universal experience,” she highlights. “We are a university museum, we want the exhibition to generate research, extension activities and knowledge production within the academic space.”