The Irish artist Eva Rothschild (b. 1972, lives and works in London) has attracted attention over the past few years with objects made out of such materials as leather, paper and Plexiglas, indicating a “renewed” preoccupation on the part of a young generation of artists with the three-dimensional object. Last year the Whitechapel Art Gallery launched what they called a new generation of British sculptors.Through the renegotiation and expansion of familiar artistic idioms and materials, these works re-accentuate the three-dimensional object by elaborating on the formal vocabulary of 1960s art in particular, and “recharging” the third dimension with the transcultural, transmedial codes of contemporary content.Eva Rothschild explores the apprehensive relationship between objective form and new-age spiritualism. Rothschild approaches art as tantamount to a numinous belief system, where functionless objects become receptacles for immaterial sentiment, both inciting and emitting their own metaphysical auras. Inspired by 60s and 70s minimalism, Rothschild’s sleek designs imbue the impersonal with a raw intimacy by utilising tactile, everyday materials. In High Times, three ‘fountains’ of finely cut leather strips spring forth with graceful avidity, evoking sustained contemplation and emotive tension.

Eva Rothschild’s artistic practice includes wall pieces and video, in which she embroiders customary notions of abstraction, representation and decoration with models of longing and projects them on various social groups. Artistic and semantic yearnings are often intertwined in her works. Her beautiful objects impart a curious melancholy, generating an ambivalent potential of abundance and hope coupled with an impressive emptiness.He is interested in un-systems of belief, non-systems, in how people move their ’spiritual’ desires between different objects and traditions. Also how certain places and things can have a spiritual power which specific belief doesn’t necessarily exclude. He is interested in the ways of looking that go with concepts of faith and in how things are invested with a power above and beyond their materiality, the transference of spirituality onto objects. That’s where sculpture comes in, making something that seems to have something extra to what is physically there. He is interested in thinking about why we feel an object has more than a material presence and in the idealism of belief. He likes that the objects and images associated with belief don’t have any other function except to furnish that belief, that they are anachronistic in a secular society where most things have a defined function or end use. Making work is like trying to show the gap in contemporary culture, where everything is available and catered for.

View Eva Rothschild paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Eva Rothschild artist. View art online at The Saatchi Gallery – London contemporary art gallery.Eva Rothschild