Tales of Elva Fischer

Written by David Knoll

27/07/2023

Elva Fischer. Greek tragedy, oil on canvas, 70x130 cm, 2019

Elva Fischer. How to keep a secret or how to hide the obvious

Take Nagaway Gallery, Japan, December 27, 2021 – January 29, 2022

In one of her last interviews, Elva said that she wants to confuse the viewer on one hand and to reconcile him with abstractionon the other. A month after these words, Elva's large solo exhibition opened at the Take Nagaway Gallery and was called "How to keep a secret or how to hide the obvious."

Everything that the exhibition consists of is a large painting cycle, several objects and two wall paintings made specially for this exhibition space. There is a lot of colour and an equal amount of white in the gallery hall: bright compositions are freely located within the canvas, from the very small to the very nearly two meters in size. Painting is organic for Elva Fischer: while working, she stretches the canvas on a frame as professionally as an old master. But maybe what is depicted should not be a painting on a plane, but jewellery, edible objects, living beings - if we imagine various parallel realities? These are forms that live their own secret lives. Layering is another important feature of Elva Fischer's art.

The same goes for her biography. The first layer is the art school in Elva’s native Bern, the second is the department of monumental and decorative painting of the Stieglitz Academy in St. Petersburg, the third is the “School of a Young Artist” course at the Pro Arte Institute and the fourth is the most successful young art group in Swiss “North 7”. All these layers intersect and without mixing, exist in the personality of Ekaterina who does not strive for an unambiguous identification of her work.

In almost every canvas shown at the exhibition, you can find some object reminiscent of illustrations from the books of Ernst Haeckel or Albert Seba - both natural science folios written by scientists with a difference of a century and a half, respectively "The Beauty of Forms in Nature" and "The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities"  have been a source of inspiration for artists moving along the surreal path for more than a hundred years. It is well known that British pranksters of the Victorian period, the second half of the 19th century, were at the origins of collage using newspaper clippings but the Surrealists gave this technique the status of art. The first to create collage images was Max Ernst, who insisted on the fundamental enigmatism of the resulting compositions and in this Elva Fischer exactly follows him. From surrealism comes the graphic automatism to which she relies. Form and line in Elva's works develop and last, so we can say that they have a narrative character.

The cycles of works that Elva showed before could easily be attributed to the organic trend in art - Elva painted with oils and felt-tip pens on transparent tracing paper and fluid lines of various nature and colour occupied the space within the frame which was as weightless as the one depicted. The most common associations with botanical atlases or tables in books about the structure of the cell were guessed but it was immediately clear that these forms on Elva Fischer’s canvases not only conduct a compositional and colouristic dialogue with each other but also that they communicate incessantly in her art.

It would not be entirely correct to deduce this professionally honed graphics of Elva from the tradition of automatic writing alone. In the new works of Elva Fischer, a surrealist immersed in narcolepsy directly collides with a hooligan street artist. Elva transfers tagging to chamber graphics from street art, the image is completed by a layer of paint from a spray can. At the same time, the two monumental forms on the walls of the gallery are distinguished by graphic delicacy - in the person of one artist Elva embodies two different artistic worlds.

Filling the sheet with signs and symbols layer by layer deep and in all directions without obvious borders, which is found in Elva Fischer, is not a frequent case in contemporary art. In relation to these works, as well as in relation to Elva's peers, the fashionable term “post-internet” often appears but only the principle of mixing diverse images in abstract works has in common with her network impressions. Elva's art pieces have much stronger connection with the tradition of obsessive painting. The space of Elva Fischer's work is organized according to musical rules: with their fun and energy, they are close to Kuryokhin's tactics in Pop Mechanics - visual impressions replace each other as unpredictably and at the same time clearly, as groups of musicians of the now legendary orchestra entered into a common action.

Definitely, Elva Fischer invents and tells a story in which the most incredible stories are mixed, everything is fictional and fantastic. While revealing the complex structure of her world, she sometimes leaves clues in it with beaded handwriting like "pineapple ecstasy". The artistry of the creator of her own universe is expressed in the colour moderation in the works of Elva, plastic lightness is associated with the confidence of the story and the fluency of speech. It is the one who trusts this narrator and follows the artist deep into the graphic sheet, who will find reconciliation with abstraction.

David Knoll has published widely on international modernism and in 2011 was a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. From 2017-21, in addition to his role in the department, he served as Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art and now sits on the Advisory Committee. David holds a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen.