EIBEN’s works chart manifold courses between perfectionism and playful ease. Constellations of disparate geometric shapes, diverse materials, and a rich palette of contrasting colors yield surprising compositions. Though informed by minimalist approaches and models like Sol LeWitt or Ellsworth Kelly, they are suffused with light-hearted humor. The artist’s sustained interest in the imperfect and unexpected and in ongoing processes lends his work an unorthodox quality that lets him test the outer bounds of traditional genres. The new wall works manifest a time capsule preserving ideas and visions that the artist has recently explored.

The exhibition’s title quotes the American poet and writer Charles Bukowski’s poem The Laughing Heart, written just before his death in 1993. Compared to Bukowski’s other writings, which typically reflect a fundamental pessimism, this poem strikes an enchantingly optimistic and hopeful note. EIBEN took inspiration from its life-affirming sentiment to ask himself questions about his own artistic voyage and more generally about the prevailing mood of our time, which is clouded by widespread uncertainties and anxieties. The title Chupi (dedicated to J.S.) is an allusion to the added construction of a bulding in New York by the artist Julian Schnabel that was a particular source of inspiration for EIBEN. He emphasizes that “a work of art has more than a single dimension of meaning. That is where titles play an important role: as a second strand running in parallel with the visual appearance, they can generate associations and prompt the beholder to draw their own conclusions.”

EIBEN’s multifaceted creative engagements defy categorization and stimulate the viewer’s sense of play, encouraging their mind to leave its “comfort zone” and enter a “realm that feels unfamiliar but is necessary so that something new can be discovered”, as the artist says. Transcending divisions of media, the hybrid works composed of a range of materials like brass, copper, lacquer, leather, wood, fabric, watercolor, or ink achieve perpetually shifting visual effects full of surprising twists, inviting the beholder to rethink their own position in their space of experience.

Can an object be painting, sculpture, and drawing at the same time? The answer is a resounding yes, EIBEN argues: “Creating a painting that also has sculptural qualities, or a hanging sculpture with graphical features, is something that appeals very strongly to me.”

HENRIK EIBEN