On a day of 1957, Eva Eisenlohr (1891–1977) carried a monument across her hometown of Freiburg, all the way from her studio to the medieval city’s Old Cemetery. Transported in a wheelbarrow, the piece was a heavy stone work of her creation, which she deposited in front of the weathered gravestone of Joseph von Auffenberg (1798–1857), beloved playwright and poet of hers. More than 50 years later, in February 2023, artist and researcher Maximiliane Baumgartner reenacted the late artist’s walk upon invitation of the Biennale für Freiburg. Accompanied by artistic director Paula Kommoss, historian Otto Hofman and a crowd of participants, Baumgartner drove a metallic wheelbarrow through the urban space along Eisenlohr’s footsteps. Akin to a public procession, the collective act involved the piling up of small rocks—like a cairn, a memorial stone mound—inside the barrow, marking an emblematic touchpoint between landscape and human hand.

Part of the prologue of this second Biennale für Freiburg, the performance set the pace for an exhibition focusing on unrecorded stories. Kommoss’s curatorial line carefully weaved contemporary practices together with historical narratives, touching upon issues of remembrance, visibility, and social divides in and beyond the city. With the title Das Lied der Straße [The Song of the Street], referring to the nomadic journey of Gelsomina in Fellini’s movie of the same name, the biennale posed the question of what a “counter melody” of the streets may sound like. Kommoss, who draws inspiration from the stories of women—both fictional and real—to address the realities of urban space, presented 34 artists and collectives across 12 different venues. Among these, two were brought together in a special, time-bending dialogue: the Düsseldorf-based artist Maximiliane Baumgartner was invited to explore the life and work of Eva Eisenlohr, whose memory lays at the core of Kommoss’s concept. The performance With the Wheelbarrow, one of four steps in Maximiliane Baumgartner’s multi-part actionspace Re-Painting Threads of the Past (2023), was a powerful unveiling of sculptures long anchored in the urban landscape, reintroducing a forgotten artist back into discourse.

Who was Eva Eisenlohr? “Her works had always been there and yet she was largely unknown,” Kommoss says when discussing the artist’s central presence in the biennale. Starting off as a painter and sculptor in 1919, Eisenlohr’s practice soon shifted to art education, urban interventions and even technological inventions as her art was deemed ‘degenerate’ by the National Socialist regime. At the biennale’s main venue, the Kunstverein Freiburg, a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work sheds light on the mechanisms of her erasure. As we learn through a collection of documents by Baumgartner titled Wall Newspaper, Eisenlohr’s burgeoning career was cut short by the Nazis in the 1930s, the consequences of which could still be felt in her work decades after. [1] Copies of the record file C4/IV/23/4 from the Freiburg City Archive, along with a commentary by art historian Thorsten Schneider, expose the suppressive measures that plagued public museums. Following Hitler’s campaigns of so-called ‘cultural purification’ in 1937 and 1938, over 21,000 works of art across Germany were seized by the authorities. Among these were two of Eisenlohr’s pieces: the watercolour Luftgeister (Air Spirits, 1930) and the wooden relief Bildnisse Freiburgs (Portrait of Freiburg, 1933). [2] The artist, who had realised several municipal commissions and was featured in both public and private collections, was prevented from exhibiting works publicly—becoming hereby the only female artist in Freiburg to face censorship at the time. [3]

A memorialisation in ricochet. Already in 1957, Eisenlohr’s daring walk was more than a personal homage to the dramatist Auffenberg. The erection of a new gravestone in his name right in front of the old one stands as a conscious gesture against oblivion, an attempt at reviving a memory literally fading. Planted on the liminal ground of the cemetery, the stone ties together personal recollection and public history. As in 2023 a new wheelbarrow traverses the streets of Freiburg laden with rocks, it is this time Eisenlohr herself who is given centre stage. A few detours from her original trajectory were made along the way: one to visit her very first public sculpture, a Renaissance-like ‘figura serpentinata’ (1919), another to the City Garden, where the Eule (Owl, around 1960) could be seen. “A distinct cartography”, remarks Baumgartner in a written score that accompanied the procession, pointing to the “spatial decisions” of the sculptor and her very own relation to the urban space. Readings continuously took place along the way—both by Baumgartner and Otto Hofman, author of one of the few existing writings on Eisenlohr.

Far from being her first intervention in the public sphere, the action With the Wheelbarrow speaks to Baumgartner’s long-lasting commitment to collective forms of knowledge-production. The Düsseldorf-based artist rarely fixes her projects to a specific medium, exploring instead the potential of transdisciplinary work to open-up artistic, social and discursive spaces, which she names 'actionspaces'. Baumgartner’s contribution to the biennale was a large-scale composition, involving an outdoor installation of paintings at the City Garden’s music pavilion and a mobile workshop for children and adolescents, both dedicated to the memory of Eisenlohr. Graciously echoing the sculptor’s own social engagement through art education, community work and activism, Baumgartner’s initiatives challenge established forms of public commemoration.

Eisenlohr’s oeuvre was sturdy, transgressive, complex. Living and working against social conventions, she subsisted by (literally) building her own structures while persistently asserting her role as a creator. Among a rich variety of two-dimensional works by the artist—drawings, woodcuts and oil paintings—a piercing self-portrait swiftly traced with charcoal was exhibited at the Kunstverein. Evidence of her broad inventiveness was also put forward in a selection of archival documents: plans of her studio in Elsäßerstraße, which she signed with the label “Bauherr” (“building master”) in 1935; or sketches of a double-tailed car with wind-guiding surfaces, patented by Eisenlohr in 1952 and designed to improve driving stability. Not only the immense creativity of Eisenlohr’s work but, equally, her self-determined spirit were made palpable all across the biennale.

As Baumgartner and Kommoss carefully unpacked Eisenlohr’s versatile and fragmented practice, they revealed with great awareness the necessity of an artistic approach that exceeds material representation. Underscoring the importance of finally inscribing Eisenlohr’s name in Freiburg’s local history, they sharply navigated the pitfalls of canonical language in unearthing her work to the public. We don’t need another monument, this biennale suggests, but open and participative modes of storytelling to reconsider the past in plural terms.

[1] Thorsten Schneider, Commentary, 2023, in Maximiliane Baumgartner, Re-Painting Threads of the Past, 2023, Wall Newspaper [art work], Biennale für Freiburg 2.

[2] Schneider, Commentary, 2023, and Maximiliane Baumgartner, Re-Painting Threads of the Past, 2023, With the Weelbarrow [score], Part I: ‘Geister in der Luft’.

[3] Otto Hofmann, ‘Eva Eisenlohr, eine Freiburger Bildhauerin und Malerin,’ in Badische Heimat, 2012, no. 1, p. 149.

Maximiliane Baumgartner, With the Wheelbarrow (2023)

With Otto Hofmann and Paula Kommoss

25/02/2023

Part of Maximiliane Baumgartner’s multi-part actionspace Re-Painting Threads of the Past, the performance With the Wheelbarrow took place during the Prologue of the Biennale für Freiburg 2, from February to May 2023. A publication focusing on the public program was released in January 2024 with DISTANZ Verlag.

Biennale für Freiburg 2

Exhibition: 16/06 – 30/07/2023

With works by Ayo Akingbade, Samar Al Summary, Halil Altındere, Danielle Arbid, James Gregory Atkinson, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Dara Birnbaum, Cudelice Brazelton IV, Eva Eisenlohr, Alia Farid, Maryam Ghasemi, Rebecca Grundmann, Deborah Joyce Holman, Kirti Ingerfurth, Anas Kahal, Amal Kenawy, Klein, Nikifor Krynicki, lo.me (Loren Tschannen und Mélissa Biondo), Hemansingh Lutchmun, Medienwerkstatt Freiburg, Shaun Motsi, Henrike Naumann, Vera Palme, Phung-Tien Phan, R.E.P. (Ksenia Hnylytska, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Lesia Khomenko, Volodymyr Kuznetsov and Lada Nakonechna), Lotty Rosenfeld, Finnegan Shannon, somebody*ies (Anna Byskov, Christina Krys Huber, Hannah Kindler, Stella Meris and Nika Timashkova), Hito Steyerl, Maria Toumazou, Matt Welch, Yong Xiang Li & François Pisapia.

Curated by Paula Kommoss

Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg

Dreisamstr. 21

79098 Freiburg