Boys and Sculpture

Influenced by minimalist forms of the 1960s and 1970s, Eva Rothschild is best known for her abstract sculptural works constructed from an array of materials including leather, paper, Plexiglas, wood and metal. Rothschild reshapes the legacy of these art-historical precedents with shape, colour and varying scale to create open-ended artworks that encourage the viewer to think about how we experience art physically as well as conceptually.

Rothschild’s preoccupation with the physical experience of an artwork is a natural precursor for her video Boys and Sculpture (2012), which tellingly and thrillingly reveals what happens when a group of young boys are let loose, unsupervised, within an exhibition space.

Rothschild worked with a group of 11 boys aged 6 to 12, allowing them to wander around a gallery installed with several of her sculptures. The artist recorded the boys as they began to circle and examine the works, first looking and then – inevitably – touching, and finally dismantling several sculptures with wild and joyous abandon. Objects of high art become tools of play, transformed into footballs, swords, cubby houses and construction materials. Informed by her own experiences as a mother and art teacher, Rothschild’s interest stems from the simple question of whether there is a difference between the ways that young boys and girls interact with objects.

More broadly, Boys and Sculpture brings to light questions around the assumptions of gender in the greater art world. Sculpture as a discipline has been traditionally thought of as the domain of men, but are other areas of contemporary art, including art schools and institutions, also overtly male-dominated? These questions quietly pervade much of Rothschild’s sculptural practice. Her interest in the physical relationship between the human body and an artwork naturally leads to a consideration of the body itself, and the ways in which it has been historically positioned, gendered and socialised.

While Rothschild’s works have an aesthetic link to minimalism, they are also totemic and symbolic shapes. In particular, she is interested in the ways in which meaning, sentimentality and spirituality are transferred on to three-dimensional, inert objects. Extending on this notion, Rothschild is concerned with how artworks acquire meaning extraneous to their material reality once they are situated within the loaded context of a gallery space.

While her work may appear mathematically precise from a distance, closer inspection reveals their handmade quality. Rothschild’s artworks provide a lesson in experiencing and looking. The triangles, cones, circles and squares of her sculptures creep into the corners and edges of rooms; making use of the floor, walls and ceiling, they encourage visitors to consider areas of the exhibition space typically overlooked.

In 2009, Rothschild created the site-specific work Cold Corners for the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain, London. Over 70 metres long, the work consisted of 26 interlocking triangles tracing the distance from one corner of the neoclassical passageway to the other. Visitors were able to walk in, around and through the work, navigating the gallery space in a wholly new way. Empire (2011), commissioned by The Public Art Fund in New York, was similarly immersive and large-scale: a multidirectional archway placed directly before an entrance to Central Park.

Rothschild holds a Master of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, London, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the University of Ulster, Belfast. Her numerous international solo exhibitions include ‘Narcissus’, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2013); ‘Sightings’, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2012–13); ‘Hot Touch’, The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire (2011), and Kunstverein Hannover (2011–12); and ‘Eva Rothschild’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2008). Rothschild was awarded the 2012 Children’s Art Commission at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, and the 2009 Duveens Commission by Tate Britain. In 2011, she was commissioned to produce a new work, Empire, for New York’s Public Art Fund.