Eva Vent

The gaze, which the woman in Eva Vent’s aquatint directs at us, the viewers, arrests us immediately. The structure of the etching evokes as it were the traces of life as it is experienced in this portrait, bringing the subject alive and rendering her legible, like a landscape that unfolds out of the dark abyss and defies it. The series of etchings that Vent produced in 1975–1976, Jüdische Frauen aus dem Altersheim der Jüdischen Gemeinde Pankow (Jewish Women from the Old Age Home of the Jewish Community of Pankow) testifies to the virtuosity with which the artist had learned to use the graphic printing technique, which she had begun to explore and adopt only a year before. In 1977, Vent pursued the subject of women’s experience once again with a series of graphic art works on the women’s prison in the Barnimstrasse. In the all-consuming darkness of the image and the prison cell, we perceive a single bright figure: A woman sitting at a table looks up from what she is reading or writing and engages us, the viewers. One is immediately struck by the intuition that this person is none other than Rosa Luxemburg, who was interned 1915/1916 Im Weibergefängnis (In the Women’s Prison)– as this print is titled.

In another print, Vent memorializes the demolition of the prison. In this almost abstract image, we see beneath a clear sky a building whose explosion sends fragments flying and seems to create a dark, billowing storm flood, from the midst of which a single, white, female figure rises in defiance of the havoc wreaked all around her. This print pays tribute to Luxemburg and all those later women who were imprisoned in this jail between 1933 and 1945 for their opposition to National Socialism – and whose legacy, whose belief in freedom, survives and overcomes every jail and every wall, including those we build in our heads.

Eva Vent, born 1933 in Passenheim, today Pasym, in Poland, completed an apprenticeship as seamstress in Rudolstadt. She studied from 1953 to 1954 at the Fachschule für angewandte Kunst in Heiligendamm and then at the Fachschule für Textil und Mode in Berlin. Between 1956 and 1961, she worked as garment designer at the Institut für Bekleidungskultur Berlin. Since 1962, she has been active as an independent artist in Berlin, leading graphic art circles in the 1970s and 1980s.

The research trips which she undertook in the 1980s to Paris, Georgia, Armenia, and the Netherlands left behind deep impressions, which also found their way into Vent’s artistic output, as we can see, for instance, in the large-format canvases she painted of Caucasian flower chandlers (1987). Vent herself names, among her artistic influences, Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Camille Claudel, and Charlotte E. Pauly. Vent carries on the tradition of these women, producing striking oil paintings of landscapes and cityscapes – devoid of people, but vibrant in their spontaneous but self-assured treatment of form, perspective, and style. Like the chiaroscuro contrasts in her etchings, Vent’s sparing use of bright colors becomes something of a narrative element in her paintings.

Without ever paying service to artistic fashions, Eva Vent experimented time and again with new techniques – her terra cotta figures of the 1990s, for instance, give ample evidence of this, as do her large-format wood-cut cityscapes of the 2010s. To her preferred subjects, however – landscapes, cityscapes, and above all the human being – she always remained faithful. Time and again, she goes in search of them, so she can leave us some trace of their existence etched on paper or painted on canvas and also recall to our memories those who never stood in the spotlight of history. A wonderful example of this is her impressive portrait In Memoriam Frau Meissner (1978) – a working woman, whom the artist met and learned to admire on a research trip to the state-owned agricultural enterprise in Putgarten-Fernlüttkevitz.

text: Anke Paula Böttcher, translation: Garrell Wilkins