Dictionary of


Art  &  Artist




 

 Elvira Bach

 

Elvira Bach         Pages: 1


(b Neuenhain im Taunus, Hesse, 22 June 1951). German painter. She studied at the Glasfachschule in Hadamar (1967–70) and under Hann Trier at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin (1972–9). From 1981, Bach was one of the few women artists to be included in numerous group exhibitions of the German Neue Wilden or Neo-Expressionist painters. Her large-scale paintings of the 1980s characteristically show full-frontal figures of one or more women in front of a flat background, painted in strong colours with broad, aggressive brushstrokes. The figures are typically dressed in contemporary clothes, wearing high-heel stiletto shoes and brandishing long, painted fingernails reminiscent of comic-strip characters or fashion models (e.g. Untitled (Female Portrait), 1981; Berlin, Berlin. Gal.). From c. 1983 to 1986 she painted a series of ‘snake nudes’, in which garishly coloured snakes wind themselves around female figures in an erotically charged fashion, as in the dynamic Baptism by Fire (1984; priv. col.; see 1984 exh. cat.). Her works are often humorous (e.g. Couple, 1982; Darmstadt, Hess. Landesmus.), which includes snowmen with melting noses joining in a society dance. From the mid-1980s Bach also produced a number of polyptychs, as well as photographs that were painted over.
 

Kenigssohn