Henrik Eiben’s Unruly Minimalism
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Henrik Eiben is a secret maximalist. While the Hamburg-based artist's sculptures possess the self-contained precision of American minimalism—a movement with which he is often associated—there is a playfulness of inquiry and experimentation happening behind the scenes.

For Eiben, the emphasis is placed on the journey of creating work rather than the eventual outcome. From abstract sketches on paper, he begins a long process of problem-solving to coax materials like lacquer, mouth-blown glass, Perspex, and wood into cohesive sculptural explorations of form and colour.

In an upcoming solo exhibition at Bartha Contemporary in London, titled Leap before you look (13 October–12 November 2023), Eiben brings together sculptures in acrylic glass, wood, copper, and corrugated iron, as well as his first material of exploration, fabric. Named after an eponymous poem by British-American poet W H Auden, Leap before you look adds a tinge of danger to Eiben's sculptures, in particular complimenting their sharp angles and tactile surfaces.

It was at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, USA, where Eiben received an MA in 2001, that he first began using fabric. Struggling to situate himself due to his multimedia approach, having at that point worked with photography, sculpture, painting, among other media, he decided to join a fabric class. He was soon surrounded by students working in haute couture and industrial design.

There, he was was struck by a professor's statement that fabric has its own logic before its transformation into something else as a result of the structure of its fibres. This led Eiben to consider the function of materials and, by extension, the formal boundaries of media such as painting and sculpture.

References to functionality appear in Eiben's fabric sculptures like Ruby (2006), a square wall relief covered in red fabric. A metal rod, also painted in ruby red, runs vertically across the place, breaking the flat surface.

In later fabric sculptures such as Voyager (2013), which resides in the collection of Kunsthalle Weishaupt in Ulm, Germany, leather, Styrodur (thermal insulation board made of thick polystyrene), and wood combine in flat, irregular shapes in different shades of blue, giving the sense of an artwork that is unfolding upon the wall.

Part of the same, eponymous series, Eiben's latest Voyager Wanda (2023) in Leap before you look is rendered in planes of blue, purple, yellow, and green positioned at varying angles. At the heart of this intricate play with light, casting shadows over protruding surfaces, a shard of mouth-blown glass adds a mysterious glow of red to the work.

When I speak with Eiben over the phone, the artist shares his dream to capture the entire spectrum of colour in a single work. This desire was inspired upon seeing Pierre Bonnard's retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. Eiben's works may not contain the many flecks of colour that define the paintings by the French Post-Impressionist, but the intelligent positioning of the parts that make up his sculptures allows them to go beyond the colours chosen for them by virtue of their interactions with light.

In Gaudon Wanda (2023), on view at Bartha Contemporary, the four irregular shapes in Perspex are white, dark blue, raspberry, and light pink. With a playful strip of pink added to the side of the blue plane, overlapping with the white, Eiben expands the colours so that they are not restricted to their respective shapes. The result is a cohesion of complexity through subtle plays with form.

Eiben underlines the importance of dealing with the messiness of process and experimentation to arrive at simplified forms.

An early inspiration for this ignited in 2010, when he saw works by Italian-born Brazilian artist Alfredo Volpi while on a residency at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo.

'At the beginning, he was painting the façades of houses, and towards the end it was just geometrical forms,' Eiben explains. 'It's the belief in the process that really influenced me. Once you trust your process and can sit with uncertainty for a while, the work can be pushed in new directions.'

Working on paper allows Eiben to play with form and colour before teasing out the specificity of his materials, which have their own innate poetry. The slick and slender CISMA (What If I Don't) (2019), for instance, is even more enticing upon the discovery that dark piece attached to the long piece of birch is made from ceramic, and that the faint, tinted shadow comes from a hidden edge painted in cyan blue.

Many of his paper and sculptural works parallel one another. The criss-crossing strips of brass in Jawlensky's Smile #5 (Rules don't stop me) (2020), which have been overlaid with nail polish-painted leather in alternating shades of yellow, red, pink, and blue, resonate with the subtle, swooping lines of watercolour on paper in The Numbers (2016).

As with the imperfections often present in fabric or the unruly strokes of paint in Bonnard's paintings, Eiben is intent on inviting the human touch back into his works despite their seemingly resolved and finite surfaces. At the core of Eiben's practice lies a sense of playfulness and possibility. —[O]