Eleonore Koch’s embrace of the traditional genres, including still life and landscape painting, set her against the main currents of Brazilian art - a modernism built on the Concretist desire for total abstraction. In this context, Koch’s commitment to figuration arguably contributed to the art-critical neglect she experienced in her lifetime. Nevertheless, her unique vision and skill captivated individuals throughout her life, including her British patron Alistair McAlpine, through whose support she was able to make a home in London through the 1970s and 80s. Under his patronage, she was able to dedicate herself entirely and freely to her painting.

This painting from McAlpine’s collection is reflective of Koch’s approach to the still life genre, using familiar formal components, such as the orange peel, which recur throughout multiple compositions in different tones. Her use of non-local colour, seen here in the dark fruits in the bowl, reflects the importance of colour relations above true representation. The still life genre offered Koch endless capacity for experimentation, as she sought to perfect the communication between colours above all else.

Her canvas paintings retain much of the character of her paper studies, with their pencil lines translated to fine black and white painted outlines, as seen here. This contributes to her peculiar sense of space, defined by multiple viewpoints contrasted by a lack of shadow and depth, the richly coloured backgrounds enveloping her objects. While her work is distinct from that of her Brazilian peers, it is more comparable with artists working in the UK at the time, including Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney, with whom she shares a similar formal economy and careful construction of space.

Her unusual perspective has also been described as a contemporary reading of Egyptian perspective, and likened to 14th century Italian painting, from where her teacher Alfredo Volpi developed his appreciation for egg tempera (1). Through the unique qualities of tempera, Koch shares a visual world with these old masters, one of stillness and bright clarity. One of the reasons Koch and Volpi favoured mixing their own egg tempera paints was the control over quality and purity this allowed, their colours translated without mediation and perfectly preserved over time (2). While Koch’s persistence with a seemingly anachronistic media and spatiality, coupled with her embrace of still life and interior scenes left her largely under-appreciated in her lifetime, it contributed to her achievement in transmitting to her viewers a wholly subjective sense of seeing and being in the world.

1 Pia Gottschaller, 'Eleonore Koch and the Brazilian Egg Tempera Revival' (unpublished).
2 Gottschaller, 'Eleonore Koch and the Brazilian Egg Tempera Revival.'