Eleonore Koch

Modern Art, London and Mendes Wood DM, New York are proud to present two concurrent exhibitions devoted to German-Brazilian painter Eleonor Koch (1926-2018) bringing together a group of works produced from the late 1960s, when the artist established herself in London, to the 1990s, upon her return to São Paulo. 

Visit Mendes Wood DM’s viewing room here.

The fact that Koch continued developing and refining her practice way beyond the early 1950s, having spent great part of this period away from the Brazilian context, did not preclude critics to insist on quoting the possibly well-intended but regrettably limiting epithet ‘Volpi’s only disciple’ whenever commenting on her work. Apart from the differences in background and trajectory, it must be noted that Koch also studied under many other artists, including Yolanda Mohalyi (1909-1978) and Elisabeth Nobiling (1902-1975). It is only roughly over the past ten years that Koch’s work has started to gain the overdue recognition it deserves. This is not to say that she has been completely under the radar of the art world. In fact, she had the support of a few but important allies - such as collectors Theon Spanudis (1915-1986) and Ladi Biezus, as well as curator and critic Lourival Gomes Machado (1917-1967) -  and although not as celebrated as some of her contemporaries, she seemed to have always been highly aware of the value and importance of her work.

Born in Berlin in 1926, Koch moved with her family - mother Adelheid, father Ernst and sister Esther - to São Paulo aged ten, in 1936. In 1949, she went to Paris to study art, returning in 1951. In 1960, she moved to Rio de Janeiro and over the decade she traveled to Greece, London and the US. During this period, she exhibited her work regularly in Brazil, although she also held a series of jobs - bookseller, set designer, secretary to influential physicist and occasional art critic Mario Schenberg -, not yet being able to make a living from her art. In 1968 she moved to London, where she would remain until 1989, finally settling in São Paulo until her death in 2018. 

This was an unusual trajectory for a Brazilian artist at the time, as most artists who could afford to study abroad returned to the country to pursue their careers. And it was even more unusual for a woman. When Koch arrived in the 'swinging London’ of the 1960s for what would become a twenty year period she was 42 years old, childless and single; in other words, free to move as she pleased. She was, up to that point - and would continue to be -, completely devoted to her work. Furthermore, in 1968 the political situation in Brazil had taken a turn for the worse: the military dictatorship that took power in 1964 issued the AI-5 (Institution Act n. 5), a decree that suspended constitutional rights and resulted in the institutionalisation of torture by the State. 

The move to a different country seems to have been a sensible option for an artist who felt she had exhausted her professional possibilities in Brazil at a time when political prospects in the homeland were bleak. During a trip to Greece in 1966, Koch made a stopover in London and actively searched for galleries that would exhibit her work, eventually being invited by Mercury Gallery to take part in their summer show. The gallery later informed her of collector Alistair McAlpine’s (1942-2014) interest in sealing an exclusivity contract to acquire her work. Suddenly, there was a concrete opportunity for professional development. The agreement with McAlpine lasted from 1971 until 1977, after which Koch took up a job as a translator for the Scotland Yard. Brazilian art critic Paulo Venâncio Filho recalls her telling him about ‘the peculiar cases she witnessed as a translator for the Scotland Yard in the London courts, without realising that even more peculiar was to be painter working for the British police!’^[2] In the two decades spent in the UK, Koch’s work was shown in exhibitions at the Portal Gallery (1970), Rutland Gallery (1972, 1976, 1982), Campbell & Franks Fine Art (1978), and Barbican Art Gallery (1983).^[3]

Some of the works from this series feature the garden to St John’s Lodge, with the three steps leading to the park’s Circular Garden flanked by two short columns occupying the centre of the composition. Koch may have been drawn to the symmetrical structure of these elements, but the sense of symmetry is somehow disturbed by the addition of solitary vertical details and by her typical treatment of the surface that brings all compositional elements to a single plane. In one of the versions of this painting, a flagpole is placed on the left side of the image, in another she includes the partial outline of a statue of Hylas and the Nymph just off-centre. The steps reinforce the horizontality of the composition, creating an imaginary line that cuts across the whole length of the canvas. At the same time, these steps are enveloped by wide empty spaces, giving the impression that they are almost floating into space. As in all of Koch’s works, the human figure is completely absent from the park series and the compositions are invariably characterised by an economy of elements with clearly demarcated zones of colour that evoke different moods. Another recurrent theme during her self-exile years are the marine landscapes in which a section of a deserted pier, a buoy or flag appear amid the vast emptiness of the sky and the sea. 

Besides landscape painting, Koch’s strict repertoire included only paintings of interiors featuring mundane objects that don’t appear to have any symbolic value: a blotter, a piece of crumbled paper, a chair, a vase, a peeled orange. At the same time, these objects have been singled out from a multiplicity of others and carefully reduced into synthetic forms that seem to have been sifted through a process of mental distillation which only allows the essential to remain. The result is far from ‘primitive’ or ‘simplistic’: images that are captured by the eye are submitted to an intense process of analytical deconstruction by the mind; only to be put together again by the hand, at which point they become infused with subjectivity. For Theon Spanudis, this slow mental process reveals Koch’s ability to make everyday objects sacred: ‘Against our profane tendency to use everything as objects for immediate consumption she regains the sacred dimension of the simple object. The ample sensitive spaces (which are not the empty dead spaces of mathematicians and scientists) are part and parcel of her intention to re-sacralise the object lost in the constant flux of mechanical consumption. A secret poetry emanates from her colours, objects, strange configurations and ample and humane spaces. (…) The objects in the seemingly figurative painting of Eleanor Koch are as much subjective as objective beings, fusing these two worlds in a new kind of existence.’^[7]

^[1] Interview with Olívio Tavares Araújo, Revista Istoé, 30/10/1985

^[2] Paulo Venâncio Filho, Remembering Lore. Eleonore Koch auction catalogue. James Lisboa Leiloeiro Oficial. 12/11/2018.

^[3] PITTA, Fernanda. Eleonore Koch’s chronology published in the monograph Lore Koch. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2013.

^[4] CARNEIRO, Barbara. Collecting and sociability: relations between Theon Spanudis and Eleonore Koch. (MA thesis, University of São Paulo. Institute of Brazilian Studies. p.133

^[5] Paulo Venâncio Filho, Remembering Lore. Eleonore Koch auction catalogue. James Lisboa Leiloeiro Oficial. 12/11/2018.

^[6] PITTA, Fernanda. Eleonore Koch’s chronology published in the monograph Lore Koch. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2013. p. 43

^[7] Theon Spanudis in Transcendent Art (exhibition catalogue) Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), 1981.

^[8] Interview with Olívio Tavares Araújo, Revista Istoé, 30/10/1985.

Photography by Eleonore Koch, Luciano Momesso.

Courtesy Orandi Momesso Collection and the Estate of the Artist.

Exhibitions organised by Modern Art, Mendes Wood DM, and Almeida e Dale.