Eve By Eva

 

 

Eva Moll is an artist. Eve is her art.

 

 

Eva Moll has been in Manhattan a few months now. Her work is being shown in high–profile galleries, such as the Cloisters Gallery and the Fountain Art Fair at the Armory as well as art shows and related happenings on the other side of the Hudson. I recently encountered her and her work –  Eve and Eva – at the Fish with Braids gallery, a rare New Jersey exhibition of Eve by Eva during what might be one of the final events at this location.

 

 

 

 

 Eva Moll has green eyes and dark blonde hair and a boundless enthusiasm about art and ideas and the ideas her art conveys. She’s very pretty and fun to photograph.  Her work combines illustrative influences in a pop art sensibility. It has a radiance, the lines and colors seem to undulate. She combines pop art motifs from diverse decades.  What if Keith Haring led a munity on the Yellow Submarine (Peter Max was one of her teachers) when Warhol wasn’t looking.

 

 

 

As she explains it, while in grad school, MFA advisor advised her that she was not a graphic artists, she was a fine artist.  She was not the artist who gets a desk at agency and comes up new logos. She embraced pop art in all its iterations. She even works in performance art, but it all seems to revolve the image of Eve – fun and famine – in the moment. Illustrations, graphic artistry, abstract splashes and spills – she seems to combine them freely, wildly – wither in form or content, no tangent is too tangential.

 

 

 

 

 

Eve is an alter ego.

 

Eve is an exaggerated version of the inner Eva.

 

Ultra-autobiographical -- the references are references to Eve’s perception of those references not actual references that can be specified – but that means much of the appreciation comes from us, not from knowing Eve… or Eva… besides, is this visual memoir by Eva or Eve? Maybe Eve is the memoir, and the art is just what Eve is doing in this memoir.  

 

 

 

 

Eva’s mother was a dedicated gardener, she sadly passed away a few years ago, at age 58. Eva turned the sorrow into art, and the alter ego began to subsume the ego part and play with the alter. Eve… Garden of Eden… the illustrated Eve began appearing in gardens. She came to New York, where her urban garden pictures have gained some traction. Big Apple. What did the original Eve do in the Garden of Eden. She ate the apple.  Apple imagery soon became incorporate to the Eve persona projected by Eva Moll artist. Eva’s Eve meeting and having a dialog with the biblical Eve, Western Civilization’s first earth mother.

 

 

 

 

In addition to the illustrative works, intermingling profiles with hearts and apple and garden motifs, there now are more abstract works, utilizing paint splashes and drips. This work is darker and sometimes seems in conflict with the more ebullient alter-ego Eve. Case-in-point is Eve Commits suicide, with paint drips on a nude, collaged with a pack of cigarettes – Eve, a tobacco branded marketed exclusively to women.

 

 

 

 

In spite of the darker echoes, Eve is vibrant and colorful. The work  is fun, playing with our concepts of identity and persona.  Eva Moll says the Eve character has even departed the canvas for performance art pieces in the flesh and blood world. Eve is an extension of her self but is the performance art an extension of the visual art or the other way around, I’m not sure. I guess we wait and see.

 

Eva Moll Website