Frauke Eigen

Eigen (b. 1969, Germany) began her career in 1995 with the BT New Contemporaries Award for her series of large scale images of burned walls called ‘Lichtenhagen’. Lichtenhagen is a district of Rostock, Germany. Stones and petrol bombs were thrown at an apartment block where asylum seekers lived and neighbourhood onlookers stood by applauding them. In 1996, a year after finishing her MA at the Royal College of Art, London she worked in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Mexico and Ukraine, to later focus on abstract natural forms, developing a distinctive aesthetic of reduction of shapes and contents, yielding images of great elegance and softness. The visual language she created is capable of shining a poetic light elevating any subject, from daily, worn-down objects and vestiges of war, to lyrical shapes of nature.

All Eigen’s works are analogue, black and white images printed on extra matt fibre-based paper, which is hand-mounted with rice starch. There is an extensive process of manual labour involved in the crafting of each work, resulting in unique objects of exquisite beauty. The tactile aspect of her technique is vital; “I use my hands to develop the films and while printing, and I feel the actual paper in my hands. As Japanese writer Sôetsu Yanagi wrote: ‘the beauty of everyday things is that things done by hand are more soulful because the hand is closer to the heart”.

Eigen’s images are calm, subtle, yet arresting. They evoke an atmosphere of silence and force us to stop for a minute and just look. Her arbitrary cropping of a scene or an object into only partial details and the great variety of grey nuances convey a different kind of hugely evocative abstraction. “Working with a Hasselblad I look down through a view-finder and the object photographed is face to face. I only have 12 pictures on a roll of film, therefore I have to be precise and accurate. This method educates me to be careful about everything I am doing. The light plays the most important role in the search for a harmonious picture; its significance is the reason why I chose ‘Shoku’ as the title of my book. Shoku is an old Japanese measurement, which refers to the luminance of a candle”

Her striking work has been exhibited internationally. She currently lives and works in Berlin. Atlas Gallery is the exclusive representative of the Frauke Eigen in the UK.