Born in Gummersbach, Germany (b. 1967)

Michaela Eichwald

CityHome 2000 Titelgenerator, 2020

Acrylic, shellac-­ based ink, lacquer, and graphite on pleather
© Michaela Eichwald; courtesy Maureen Paley, London. Photo by Ian Reeves.

Since 2011, Katz has been making paintings of roosters that she refers to as “cock paintings,” relishing the discomfort of the term. As she has acknowledged, these works reference the male ego: “The paintings are about masculinity, and about trying to work out the iconography of power, and the attraction to it.” The Other Side depicts a rooster in motion through a series of overlapping silhouettes, speed- ing from left to right in a way that recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographic studies of moving forms. In each of the “cock paintings,” Katz sprinkles grains of rice onto the canvas and paints over them, creating an impasto texture that reinforces the works’ materiality in the face of painterly illusion. The title and imagery of The Other Side draw on the timeless antihumor of the road-crossing chicken.

Michaela Eichwald in Auf das Ganze achten und gegen die Tatsachen existieren, courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel.

“From my perspective, it was a very good polymorphously­ perverse school with many original teachers where I could learn and experience what I wanted to know. In a direct, physical way. When it all got too much for me, I could switch to my other school, the university.”

—Michaela Eichwald