Anna Laudel Düsseldorf presents Anke Eilergerhard’s solo exhibition titled “Hysterische Balance” between 25 November 2021 – 12 February 2022. The exhibition showcases works created during the pandemic for the first time in addition to the titular, three-part and room-filling sculpture ensemble HYSTERISCHE BALANCE. Although Eilergerhard uses the same ‘vocabulary’ typical of her work, noticeably new ‘texts’ have emerged.

“The neologism HYSTERICAL BALANCE is, like all the names of my artworks, part of the artistic material and describes for me best the new pandemic feeling of life that can be perceived in me and around me.” – Anke Eilergerhard

Anke Eilergerhard is critically acclaimed for her artistic position, which is unique in the world. Presented in numerous museums and at international art fairs, her works balance virtuously between the boundaries of concrete sculpture, abstraction and figurative sculpture. The fascinating sculptures immediately catch the eye because of their daring compositions and their tactile and often intensely colored surfaces.

“My observations and experiences are the basis of all of my works. For me, it is about making things visible that I cannot put into words and that are nevertheless universal. A cake with a whipped cream top is a piece of heaven on earth. The whipped cream is for me the perfect sculptural form. It has something cosmic. It reflects the longing for paradise.” says Anke Eilergerhard.

For over 30 years, the motif of the “Layer Cake“ has played a prominent role in Anke Eilergerhard’s oeuvre. Since 2004, she has been focusing on the sculptural form of the swirl of whipped cream, staged through her unconventional technique. Her material is silicone (highly pigmented polyorganosiloxan) and her trademark is the ”icing on the cake“.

Polyorganosiloxane, which is popular amongst do-it-yourselfers and cosmetic surgeons alike to correct imperfections in appearance, in this context, is also the perfect one for the artist, in addition to its material properties as a plastic.

Like a confectioner, she sculpts innumerable cream caps from polyorganosiloxane (silicone) manually into a sculpture. “I take it as a compliment when people think that my works are machine-made because they look so uniform and accurately sprayed.” says Eilergerhard about her sophisticated technique which can be described as an elaborate creative act of creating individual “cream caps” in miniature by hand.

Photo by Katja Illner