Colour me bad ...
Martin Eder is one of the big, brash names of German art, with a rep for playing with things people really like looking at: fluffy, blue-eyed kittens, pedigree pooches, naked women/porn stars and, more recently, men.
Sticky fingers ...
Like Jeff Koons he wades up to his eyeballs in sticky, sickly kitsch. Unlike Koons – famed for shiny, blank and impenetrable metal balloon dogs or his gold statue of Michael Jackson – the mood of Eder’s paintings is far from upbeat: it’s a bad trip through consumer culture.
Dirty pretty thing ...
This young man has the dead fish eyes, dark circles and sweaty sheen of an overlong high or hangover. With its sexy snake and lilac backdrop, the homoeroticism is flagrantly naff.
No jacket required ...
Unlike ancient Greece’s temples or scantily clad Christian martyrs, male nudes have largely been missing in spaces dedicated to high culture through the 20th and 21st centuries. Eder’s seducer underscores this values shift, where male nudes are sex objects on the fringe.
Martin Eder: Parasites, Newport Street Gallery, SE11, to 13 January 2019
