Anke Eilergerhard

Born in Wuppertal, Germany, Anke Eilegerhard creates beguilingly hypnotic sculptures that stimulate not only the sight, but also our senses of touch, taste, and smell. A painter by training, Anke Eilergerhard began creating sculptures in silicone in 2004. Her applied interest in the tactile properties of materials has been at the forefront of her practice since early in her career, when she showed her paintings, which featured floral excrescences that extended outside the limits of the framing, in textured frames. Anke Eilergerhard’s artwork is created with silicone and a piping bag, a tool conventionally used to decorate pastries. Drawing with pastry decorating techniques as a source of motif, her works burrow from traditions of Pop Art by placing formal beauty and everyday objects on equal playing field. The exactitude and preponderance of repetitive motifs reflect the artist’s particular fascination with sensorial pleasures. The meticulous accumulation of these silicone “whirlpools of whipped cream” give Anke Eilergerhard’s sculptures a structured and controlled appearance. The superimposition of layers, and in some cases objects, gives a monumental, almost totemic character to the sculptures.