ARTIST BIO: Margret EICHER
Margret Eicher (born1955 in Viersen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany) is renowned as a digital artist who works with the textile medium of tapestry. Having studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy (1973-1979) with a focus on drawing, Eicher subsequently developed the technique of “Copy Collage”, to become part of the Copy Art movement, duplicating motifs in the public domain by means of ordinary laser copies. Since the early 2000s, the artist has become known for her “Medientapisserien” (Media Tapestries): digital montages of image motifs commenting on the mass media and ever-accelerating information age of the 21st century, which she produces as woven tapestries. Invoking the historical significance of tapestries as signifiers of wealth and power, formerly limited to the nobility, Margret Eicher's tapestries feature the superstars of today. Working for over 25 years with this practice of digital collage, she spins intricate visual narratives combining quotations from art history with diverse icons of popular culture. Drawing on the historical canon of European art, she populates her motifs with contemporary characters from film and television, advertising, the music industry, video games and the vast digital image archive of the internet. These digital collages are then woven on digital Jacquard looms into tapestries. The Jacquard loom, dating back to the turn of the 19th century, with its binary punch-card technology, is widely considered to be the forefather of the computer. Eicher’s Media Tapestries move in a hybrid manner between digital and textile; between mystical narratives and complex media worlds.
Selected recent solo museum exhibitions include: Museum Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig, Germany (2025); Albrechtsburg Castle Museum, Meissen, Germany (2024); Moritzburg Museum, Hall, Germany (2022-23); Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, Germany (2021); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2020); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2018); YAY Gallery, Baku, Azerbaijan (2015);. Selected recent group museum shows: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2025); Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2025); Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany (2025); Deutsches Textilmuseum, Krefeld, Germany (2024); Kasteel D’Ursel Castle Museum, Hingene/Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Museum Merano Arte, Merano Italy (2024); Eutin Castle Museum, Eutin Germany (2023); KAI 10 Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany (2023); ZKM Karlsruhe/ European Culture Capitale Luxembourg (2022); Boghossian Foundation Villa Empain, Brussels, Belgium (2022); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Schloss Pillnitz Museum, Dresden Germany (2021); Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst, Berlin, Germany (2020); Me Collectors Room, Berlin, Germany (2019); Museum Schloss Caputh, Stiftung Staatlicher Schlösser und Gärten, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany (2019); München Kunstpavillion, Munich, Germany (2019); Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden, Germany (2019); Kunstverein Pforzheim Museum, Pforzheim Germany (2018); Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin Germany (2018); KunstHaus Potsdam Kunstverein, Potsdam Germany (2018); Museum Liner, Appenzell, Switzerland (2017); Kunsthalle der Sparkasse Leipzig, Germany (2017); Kunstmuseum Singen, Singen Germany (2017); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2017); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2017); Kunstverein Ulm, Germany (2016); Kunstverein Bellevue-Saal, Wiesbaden, Germany (2016); Port 25 Raum für Gegenwartskunst, Mannheim, Germany (2016); Museum Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern, Germany (2016); Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, Berlin, Germany (2015); Spazio Luparia, Stresa, Italy (2015); Gallery of Art Critics Palace Adria, Prague, Czech Republic (2015); KHM - Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, Austria (2015).
Ice Age
2024
Textile: digital collage, Jacquard-woven tapestry
130 x 260 cm
Eicher’s recent work Ice Age is a tapestry based upon Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting “The Sea of Ice” (1823-24). Reimagining this well-known art historical work on its 200th anniversary, Margret Eicher creates a landscape that no longer exists – an ecological work that reminds us of the devastation of the Arctic within the short planetary timeframe of two centuries. The discordant colours and fragmented forms of her version of this painting, however, not only refer to global warming and the despoliation of the ice mass, but also to the way in which this previously inaccessible polar region has now become globally contentious. Eicher’s re-vision of this historical artwork, updated to the global concerns and technologies of the present, looks back at the past to comment on our collective future.
Then We Take Berlin
2018
Textile: digital collage, Jacquard-woven tapestry
295 x 230 cm
Then We Take Berlin invokes Eicher’s customary lightness of humour to tackle a heavy historical subject. This tapestry depicts the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles emerging from a dense forest landscape. These fictional cartoon characters are standing in front of a real historical building in Berlin, built on top of a man-made hill, made from the rubble of the destruction of the city during WWII. This “palace”, left derelict for many decades in the depths of the forest, was formerly a post-war army listening post. This forest still exists in nature, but the landscape of this image was built on the ruins of history, and the only living survivors in Margret Eicher’s work are the cartoon characters of mass media – and the bees sustaining life on our planet. Her forest is unnaturally lush, a classical image of a timeless paradise transposed upon the debris of the past. The classical composition of Eicher’s tapestry comments wryly on both the chaotic history of Central Europe, and the mass media infiltrating every part of our daily lives. While the art-historical quotations that underlie all of Eicher’s work, are here humorously alluded to in the names of the four characters central to the composition - Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo - Eicher reanimates what is often regarded as the antiquated art form of tapestry into an undeniably contemporary expression. In her Media Tapestries space and time intertwine by recontextualizing appropriated images in stories of futures past.
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