Our friend Sasha Bogojev from Juxtapoz magazine wrote a nice review on Willehad Eilers’s current exhibition Holiday on Horse in Harlan Levey Projects 1050. Feel free to immerse yourself into Willehad’s paintings while reading the text below and come to HLP 1050 to see more. The exhibition is on display until 2nd April, 2022.
"I‘m inappropriately biased when talking about his work cause over the past 5-ish years I‘ve been knowing the man I‘ve been enjoying the way he‘s approaching his work, the development of his technique and concepts, and how terrifyingly actual and relevant it keeps getting. In the past, he has been naming Grosz or Dix as some of the artists he feels connected to, if nothing else, by painting his vision of the 2020s just as they painted their vision of the 1920s. „He’s had to deal with the horrors he saw in the war, while mine have been done to deal with the fear of coming across as lazy,“ Wayne told me a while ago, but it feels like the history wanted the work to be even more relatable. And this is how the über-monumental, over the top Gone-With-The-Wind-on-steroids scene in While The World Is Burning, suddenly became a trippy alt-documentation of the strangest corners of reality
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This image is actually presented twice in the show as Willehad painted in oil, but also as one of the three black ink and acrylic on pulsating red background pieces, bringing back the attitude and approach of his „blind drawings“ to the large canvas arena. More expressive than any work I remember seeing from him, allowing the paint‘s runniness to channel his inner Pollock at moments, the two versions are kind of a flex on where he‘s at as an artist – appearing as works by two different people yet both somehow capturing the same dynamite intensity
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What I do enjoy particularly about these newer works are the shifts in perspectives and depth and the more macro approach to depicting the full package. Still keeping a literal ton of characters, internal jokes, and random marks or gestures, the „people“ and objects in the front feel more compact and defined than ever before. Well, if by „compact and defined“ you accept teeth fluttering in the wind or flocks of eyes taking off on their own"
– Sasha Bogojev
You can find the review here.
