The Brooklyn Rail

Carolin Eidner’s Daddy Dying Sun at Ruttkowski;68 includes nine works, all of which were executed in 2025 and employ a rather curious technique that makes inventive use of hard plaster, pigment, and extruded polystyrol. Eidner begins with a series of motifs that she either sketches or renders in Photoshop and then prints or stencils on a panel. By pigmenting the plaster, she applies the arrangement onto the panel in pieces before, upon finishing, sanding the plane so as to achieve a flat, smooth surface pocked by the occasional slight crater or crag. Eidner’s process is similar to that of Roman mural painters of the First Pompeian Style—also known as “incrustation” and “masonry style”—characterized by trompe-l’œil marble veneering achieved by stucco molding. Unlike her muralist antecedents, Eidner does not emulate the complex patterns that gloss surface materials like wood or marble. Although many of Eidner’s works do deploy checkered background sequences of alabaster and black or peach on dust, these do not strike one as naturalistic. Instead, both foreground and background are haze-stricken in a soft, artificial palette.

Given their flatness, viewing the works edge-on, one can not espy the three-dimensionally raised layers of brush strokes that characterize most paintings. Although she subordinates color to material, this flatness is at odds with Eidner’s occasional penchant for Op-art illusionism. This is evident in the cuboid arrangements of T.1 (Tribunal) and T.2 (Tribunal), two of the strongest works in the show. In both works, Eidner demonstrates that the achievements of Morris Louis’s “Unfurled” (1960–61) series do not only apply to painting. In Louis’s works, rivulets of color seep into the canvas’ threads, realizing a flatness that had, until that point, only served as the teleological essence impelling the modernist orientational narrative forward. By filtrating color into a surface, Eidner also achieves such literal (rather than virtual) flatness through this material technique, which she no sooner denounces through the illusionism of her subjects. In the “Tribunal” series, Eidner plots particolored squares into a shimmering upward sweep such that the entire checkered structure appears to quiver and vibrate, the effect recalling Bridget Riley’s tessellating patterns. In T.1, the scattering of salmon and silver-slate checkerboard in the upper left and top edges is fringed by cinereous gray tonal scales. The lower-left edge is flanked by varisized brick blocks. T.2 trades gray tile for highlighter yellow. An incised white asterisk marks the upper right center field with a glint and a set of uneven, thickly delineated ingots are stacked atop the polyhedron’s top and left faces. Where the planes meet, their vertex is pierced by an arrowhead edge, suggesting that the form is warped, pinched along its corners.

Most of the remaining seven works hew toward figuration, though some, like Ding-Dong?, Daddy Dying Sun, and At the shore 1, quilt these motley checkered squares and stacked brick arrangements into the background. Set under cartoonish visages and adumbrated human silhouettes, the quivering, off-kilter undulations become static and merely decorative affectations. Like her mentor, Rosemarie Trockel, Eidner also deploys Op art as part of her variegated pictorial lexicon. Eidner’s Ding-Dong? and Daddy Dying Sun both use the leitmotif of wide-eyed pin-up girls characterized by small puckered lips curved into a slanted beam. Their almond eyes and thick threads of hair are, in every iteration, wrapped in paisley bandanas. Eidner returns to this motif in the triptych, Tribunal, where six such figures gaze out toward the percipient; here, the sprites’ folded arms balance their slightly askance heads. A few of the girls bite wheat straws. Set into coquettish repose, the figures are reminiscent of Rita Ackermann’s caricature nymphets. In Ding-Dong?, Eidner subtracts much of her vamp leitmotif such that all that remains are a set of wry features—lash-blanketed eyes, smirk-cornered lips, and a swooping set of black eyebrows, all set in a powder blue oval mantle from which emanate thirteen jagged rays. Such is the titular “sun,” which reappears in the eponymous Daddy Dying Sun. In the latter work, however, the cherub-like feminine figure is more recognizable. She curls her fingers around the soft, tawny sun rays, a number of which laminate through a group of floating ash-colored apples.

In At the shore 2, these faces become a grayscale border strip, serving as the margins framing a beach-side scene. A series of would-be-thin rectangular brushstrokes sweep and fold into the silhouette of an erect figure—an armor-clad voyager who stands before an aquamarine sea. It is notable that, tinging masonry with pigment, Eidner emulates brushstrokes. This optical slippage encourages viewers to (falsely) cognize the work and its constituent verbiage through the concepts of painting. Eidner’s chicanery helps explain why, exactly, she has taken to the incrustation style when she very well could have simply painted her subjects and arrangements. Indeed, Eidner is a postmodernist, interested in medium and subject-based slippages. Her approach to alien, off-kilter forms has much in common postmodernists like Gia Edzgveradze, Tamara K.E., David Humphrey, and Trockel. This coterie traffics along the edges of recognizability, decrying forms from the precipice where geometric shapes’ perimeters crag into lopped, broken forms and potentially uniform bodies skew into incongruous suggestions.

But, unlike her postmodernist compatriots, Eidner is not a painter proper, but a pluralist—in media and subjects alike. In his 2001 essay on Cy Twombly, Arthur Danto characterizes the pluralistic expanse as that in “which anyone can do anything, except that painting itself has come to be politically suspect.” Eidner not only treats painting as suspect but also shows that even its historical genres do not properly belong to it. This is why she actualizes what painting typically enjoys—brushstroke-bearing forms and illusionism—through other means. Viewed head-on, these works appear perceptually indiscernible from paintings. It is only when obliquely received that one notices the board’s flat plane. In a handful of other works, like Yes and At the shore 1, it is less clear why Eidner is making use of the incrustation process, as these works do not address painting. But in works that realize painting by other means, such as the “Tribunal” pieces—which are exceptionally strong, conceptually fecund, and well-executed—Eidner’s intentions become pellucid.