Page 2 - Eva Bosch: Shoes and Stars

Personal and Universal

Eva Bosch’s paintings are passionate and declamatory. )ey say: Let me
tell you about Figueró, the village where I grew up in Catalonia, and the girl
who came to school on a donkey and who smelled of cows and who killed
herself because of a secret. )ey say: Let me tell you about my great loves,
Picasso and Miró (Bosch’s relationship with these other Catalonian artists
is proprietorial, of ownership). And sometimes it is as if her paintings lean
back a li*le in their chairs and say: Have I ever mentioned Ken Ki! and
Carl Jung? Before leaning forward again and +xing you with their eye and
saying: Do you know what it is like to paint because you have no choice but
to paint? To paint against the odds? Do you? Really?

Bosch’s painting starts, and ends, with stories that are both personal and
universal. Her protagonists are the shapes, the forms, she uses. )ey look
pre-existent, as though drawn from a bank of universal human arche -
types, but actually, they evolve through hours in the studio, morphing on
the canvas, gaining and losing heads, swapping genders, growing limbs,
until they +nd themselves and their relationships one to the other. Evoca -
tive and suggestive, operating through symbols and mood rather than
through linear narrative each image unfolds for the artist as she paints,
+nding its way through her memories and in,uences, coalescing around
her expressive urgency. Tw& examples follow.

!" # $ % # & ' (