Martin Eder

Martin Eder is a German artist known as the master of ‘surreal kitsch’. Recognised for his hyper-realistic paintings that possess an absurd or unsettling element, Eder probes capitalist society’s constructs of beauty and desirability with a captivating mix of sarcasm, vivid colour, and garishness.

Born in Augsburg, Germany in 1968, Eder studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg and, later, at the Dresden College of Fine Arts. His artistic pursuits are wide-reaching, and he produces art across mediums, including sculpture, painting, photography, performance, and music. He continues to perform as a founding member of the metal band Ruin.

Eder’s creative perspective when viewing the world around him manifests in a particularly distinct and arresting visual arts practice. Unafraid to observe and draw from the aspects of life that he believes often intimidate, disgust, or are frowned upon by other artists, Eder is able to see the ‘beauty in filth’. He is inspired by the interesting visual phenomena and colour combinations that are found in the grimy parts of our world, such as the undergrowth on the side of a highway or the edges of a service station parking lot. These spaces offer up a wealth of sensory triggers, from vomit to colourful, shiny discarded crisp wrappers, that represent the inherent tensions between beauty and disgust that exist around us.

In his paintings in particular, Eder explores these seemingly opposing forces, constructing a world in which the boundary between the two is perhaps less solid than generally assumed. In his ‘Phantasma’ cycle of work, completed in 2021, wrinkly, alien-like sphinx cats glare out at the viewer against cotton candy skies of soft pink and blue, simultaneously visually arresting and unsettling. Similarly, soft neon and pastel reflections shimmer off the oily, cellulite-strewn buttocks of nude figures shown only from the waist down, physically vulnerable and exposed as their detached forms fill the image frame. Once again, there is a push and pull between beauty and desire and unease or revulsion.

Eder not only forces the viewer to question constructs of desirability but also the very nature of art, creating subversive paintings that seek to challenge the ‘fine art’ paradigm. His paintings are often populated by the most cliché of figures: fluffy animals such as kittens and bunny rabbits or beautiful young girls. Eder paints them in a hyper-realist style that simultaneously highlights his skilled brushwork, pandering to the fine art establishment, but is also reminiscent of nostalgic kitsch products. Appearing against bright, splashy colours evoking adverts or children’s t-shirts, these figures create a juxtaposition between reality and a blatant artificiality that highlight the absurdity of art in a capitalist society.

In doing so, Eder constructs a surreal world that the viewer struggles to identify as sweet dream or nightmare, incorporating aspects of his studies of hypnosis and psychoanalysis into his works. Eder’s paradox is that in his bombastic alternate universe, we are forced to reckon with the reality that revulsion and desire, the grotesque and the beautiful, are often intermingled, while the boundaries between high art, cliché, and commodity become almost indiscernible. Eder’s daring compositions challenge not just the way we see art but the very essence of our sensory experiences.