Eva Lake

Frosch & Portmann is pleased to present Cactus Flowers, Eva Lake’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The show includes two recent collage series by the Portland (OR) based artist.

The Cactus Flower series imbue vintage Arizona landscape images with fractured portraits of mid-century modern women — their gaze from high up in the western sky or embedded in gaudy desert petals directed towards the viewer.

Within the compositions, the faces of these mostly anonymous beauties are fragmented and sliced, concealing their real temperament. Romanticized imagery replaces facial discrepancies, proposing the rare beauty found in a sparse desert landscape. Albeit, this beauty is fading as the amalgamation of pristine western landscape and fragmented female portrait hint at hardship. In Cactus Flower No. 13, a woman peeks out from behind the crystalline waterfall with an eyebrow raised, as if to convey her unspoken agitation. She is merged with the picturesque American scenery, but both contribute to a facade, an homage to ‘what was but no longer is’. With her reshuffling of images, Lake repositions the mid-century woman; revealing her mystery, the artist visually emphasizes a look into complicated lives, lives that were portrayed as easy and breezy but were not.

The show also includes four works from Eva Lake’s recent Nurses series. She began these collages in early March with images of World War II nurses, but considering the universalized mask-wearing amid the pandemic, Lake realized, “We were all practicing our medicine in some way.” Thus she expanded the work to include other mid-century women from her stash of vintage images.

“The butterfly-masks idea came to me when I had already made quite a few. For me a butterfly is about transformation and change — and hope and the future, and so many positive things that we need right now.”

—Eva Lake

Eva Lake has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe since the 1980s and is the recipient of multiple awards and grants. Lake studied art history at the University of Oregon and painting at the Art Students League of New York. While in school, she worked for the York Archaeological Trust on a Roman site in Yorkshire.