KONSTRUKTIONEN 1.2/ No. 12/ 2020 Print

While her grandparents had introduced Eva Adam to traditional painting when she was a child, she discovered graffiti during her teenage years as a (in Baudrillardian terms) “form of expression of an anti-discourse” which escapes the principle of identification. She did not, however, embrace graffiti in its usual form, as in the spraying of building facades, trains, or subway tunnels, but as a structure for her artistic work: Just like urban sprayers engage through their individual tags in a dialogue of signifiers without signifieds, she continuously draws inspiration from previous works, as if following an infinite train of thought. Her oeuvre resembles a mobius strip that, when cut, splits into units that are separate – and yet inseparably entangled. The elevation of organic phenomena into abstraction is the focus of her interests. Just like graffiti tags make use of everyday codes of communication but undermine them through an exaggerated lack of referentiality, her paintings turn biological processes into amorphous landscapes of hyper-representation. Eva Adam, born in 1991 in Hamburg, lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.