Eva Wolf-Schliesser always has her finger on the pulse of her times. She draws on current issues of concern for society and reinterprets them in her art. The result is series of works such as those on men, women, family, technology, war, animals, music and sport.
Eva Wolf-Schliesser seeks to tap and represent the wide variety of facets of the subject “sport” in an artistic way. This is one of the reasons why this series was created using silk-screen printing and etching techniques. The artist depicts a wide variety of sports such as handball, rowing, racing, hurdle jumping, soccer, ski jumping and wrestling. At first glance, these are familiar scenes that lead us into the midst of sporting events and make us spectators.
On looking closer, our sense of familiarity is shattered: The viewer realises that the skier is not vaulting from the ski jump, but from a Gothic cathedral. Classical sports documentation is juxtaposed here against artistic intervention. A surreal scenario is created and staged by the unbroken use of glaring local colours. Eva Wolf-Schliesser challenges the viewer’s reaction in order to be thought-provoking: “Sport is precious and costly, sport is elitist and vulgar”.
The artist thus depicts the ambiguity of sport as myth and mass phenomenon in a variety of ways, working with the expressiveness of colours and forms. The old Gothic building symbolises the long cultural tradition of sport and physical performance. The use of the colour gold plays ironically under the thesis “sport as a substitute for religion” with the preciousness of sporting talent, but also with the financial transactions surrounding sport. (Quote from the exhibition “Mythos Sport” in the picture at the VfK wrestling association Schifferstadt, 1994).
Text: Lena Berkler, M. A.
