Iris Eichenberg: Bend
November 23, 2014 – January 25, 2015
Bend is a solo exhibition by contemporary jewelry artist Iris Eichenberg, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Metalsmithing Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. As a point of departure, Eichenberg revisited her artistic practice; the result is an unconventional retrospective of her 25-year career told through a body of new work. Decades in the making, this exhibition is an introspective look at the alchemic process of creation and the artist’s life-long research into the behavior of materials.
The exhibition’s title, Bend, speaks to the language of the body and the artist’s material choices—gold, brass, rusted steel, textile, and mirrored glass—as well as Eichenberg’s circuitous path as a jewelry artist. Eichenberg has described her process as “drawing in materials” and for this exhibition she has sketched on a more monumental scale. The exhibition features life-size enlargements of work the artist previously executed though the jewelry-making process, thereby becoming sculptural anomalies that enact the body and ornament at the same time.
Iris Eichenberg: Bend was organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Laura Mott, Curator of Contemporary Art and Design. It is sponsored, in part, by the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Exhibition Fund. The accompanying exhibition catalog, which will be available for purchase at the front desk, is supported, in part, through a grant from the Rotasa Foundation.