Eleonore Koch

30 May-28 Jun 2024

Eleonore Koch, Detail: The Coast, 1974, Egg tempera on paper. Credit: Photography by Eva Herzog, courtesy of Cecilia Brunson Projects

Overview

Cecilia Brunson Projects presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Eleonore ‘Lore’ Koch (b. 1926, Berlin, d. 2018, São Paulo) in our gallery viewing room. Focused on the artist’s time living in London, the exhibition includes works never before exhibited, from the collection of her most important British patron.

We are pleased to see the painter celebrated in two cities so significant in her artistic journey, presenting her work in London in concurrence with a major retrospective at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), Brazil.

Eleonore Koch is not easily placed in the narrative of Brazilian art history. Her singular figurative style, developed against a culture dominated by male geometric abstractionists, has delayed full appreciation of her achievement in transmitting to her viewers a wholly subjective sense of seeing and being in the world. Nevertheless, this remarkable skill captivated individuals throughout her life, including her British patron Alistair McAlpine, through whose support she was able to make a home in London through the 1970s and 80s and dedicate herself entirely to painting.

First an immigrant to Brazil, having fled Germany in 1936, and then a foreigner in London, her pictorial world is a product of her rootlessness, at once a synthesis of diverse influences and its own suspended reality – an oneiric landscape in which the artist built a permanent home. Through her time in London, highly traditional themes including still lifes with fruit or flowers, or coastal landscapes, became the subjects of an ongoing exercise in clarifying this world, which she painted with a sun-drenched luminosity and heavy atmosphere.

Koch’s dedication to the discipline of egg tempera painting is an important factor in this expression of an inner vision, allowing her to lay down colour with unparalleled purity and intensity. Her London paintings,
though often composites of props and settings from her past lives around the world, are tinted with a northern light, distinguished by the spectrum of blues and greens that dominated in this period. Displayed alongside tempera on paper studies, the artist’s meticulous revision of each composition is revealed, as she sought to perfect the communication between colours above all else.

As a gallery founded on the ambition to strengthen artistic dialogues between the UK and Latin America, we are pleased to share works from Koch’s formative London years, which so concisely capture the processes of one of Brazil’s most unique and visionary artists.

Artists

Press

Eleonore Koch press release
Download