Biography
View works. Iris Eichenberg, Maria, 2024
Maria, 2024
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"Making things takes time. My everyday impatience—with the world, with people—disappears when materials, or rather, processing or working on and with materials, demand, impose their own conditions of time, of temporal extension, of patience, of humility. I take materials very seriously. My seriousness about things, about making things, my attempt to hold onto the energy of both the material and the process of making, in solitude, ideally connects me, through the work, to a void that may become available to the viewer, as such.

 

I am an object-maker because I believe in the power of objects. Objects may comfort us, make us present, create an awareness of ourselves. There is no self without objects to make up our constitutive outside, to map out, and to reassure us of our own existence. The objects I create fill the void where words fail us. Objects legitimate our existence. The three-dimensional objects I create, out of familiar, everyday materials—wool, steel, textiles, clay, nails, mirrors, pantyhose—at the same time render strange what we think we already know—about ourselves, about the world."

German-born artist Iris Eichenberg received her training as a jewelry artist at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. After her graduation−with a series of work for which she was awarded the Gerrit Rietveld Prize 1994, she taught in the jewelry department for several years, to become Head of Department in 2000. In 2007, she additionally accepted a position as Artist-in-Residence/Head of the Metals Department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and moved permanently to the US a year later. Eichenberg has been leading the Metals Department at CAA into new directions, turning it into a research lab where students learn to give expression to their ideas through the rigorous exploration of a wide range of materials and techniques.

Eichenberg’s own work, extending from directly body-related objects and jewelry to multiples, serial work, and installations, has been shown worldwide, at, among others, Ornamentum Gallery, Hudson, NY, Cranbrook Museum of Art, Gallery Louise Smit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Design Miami, SOFA Chicago, Sungkok Art Museum Seoul, Korea, Coda Museum, Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Her work has been purchased by, and been added to the collections of, among others, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC, and the Rotasa Foundation, Mill Valley, CA.

An extraordinary ambassador of her field and its innovation, Eichenberg travels the world giving lectures on her work, and has taught workshops at renowned art schools and programs, such as Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, the Hong Kong Institute of Vocation Education, and the Hiko Mizuno College in Tokyo, Japan.

Not necessarily beautiful ornaments, Eichenberg’s works present a unique mode of occasionally disconcerting beauty. Mixing high-tech procedures with traditional forms of craft, some series explore the interdependence of the senses, blurring the boundaries between body and adornment, to foreground the object as experience. Others use archetypical objects and familiar forms, to give expression to the most profound and intense feelings.

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