Eva, one half of the beloved German artist duo EVA & ADELE, has died. The couple’s Instagram page announced Eva’s passing on Wednesday, but did not specify a cause.
Eva never revealed her true age, though she chose her wedding day as her birthday. For that reason, EVA & ADELE’s representative, the Munich-based Galerie Nicole Gnesa, said in its obituary that Eva was 34 years, one month, and 10 days old.
“She has left this world and entered the eternal stage,” their Instagram post reads. “Her belief in the power of art was endless. FUTURE.”
EVA & ADELE were widely known within the art world for treating their lives as a performance. They repeatedly made public appearances dressed in similar outfits, causing them to seem more like twins than romantic partners.
“Their twin-ness, carefully constructed and documented in their photographic self-portraits, feeds this ambiguity: presenting themselves as a single entity embodied in two bodies, they erase notions of individuality and duality to propose a fascinating unity,” artist and researcher Rose Bideaux recently wrote.
The performance was meant to disturb the gender binary. “Because we have female forenames,” Eva told the Guardian in 2011, “the female dominates. We wear ultra-feminine clothing. Never trousers, always heels. That’s very important. But we have these phallic shaved heads.”
That year, Eva legally transitioned, changing her gender to female in official documents after a lengthy legal batter to do so. The change partly came about so that Eva and Adele could be married as two women in Germany, which had until 2011 not allowed people to legally change genders unless they altered their body.
But Eva did not identify as a woman. She told the Guardian, “I’m neither a man nor a woman. Neither is Adele. We’ve invented our own sex.”
Within the art world, EVA & ADELE were fixtures at opening receptions, biennial previews, and art fair inaugurations. “I have seen EVA & ADELE around for years,” wrote critic Adrian Searle in the Guardian. “Whenever I go to the Venice Biennale, Documenta, Manifesta, there they are, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, and Zeliga.”
“They add a bit of colour,” Searle added, “and I like their gender play and the pleasure they obviously take in dressing up for each other and for us. Their presence gives me pleasure.”
Eva’s true birthdate was never publicly reported, nor were details about her upbringing or education. All that the 2011 Guardian profile managed to include was the possibility that she may have hailed from Austria, which writer Helen Pidd had noticed because of her accent. “We come from the future, but I learned German in Vienna,” said Eva.
Rather than listing exhibitions and educational degrees, EVA & ADELE’s CV only includes details about their physical sizes. (EVA: Height 176, Chest size 101, Waist size 81, Hip size 96, per that CV.) Per the lore the artists had supplied in the press, EVA & ADELE had traveled by time machine and met in Italy in 1989 before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They were unofficially married on April 11, 1991, when the artists held a matrimonial ritual at an exhibition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau museum that featured works by artists from both East and West Germany.
By then, the artists had already begun making videos together. But they did not feel the need to speak about their work until 1995, when their life-as-art performance “became a serious declaration to create a work of art,” as Eva said in a 2012 interview.
In that same interview, Eva said the public was not always receptive to their project. She described witnessing a man with a “murderous stare” miming physical harm to them while they were in a cafe near Buchenwald, the site of a concentration camp outside Weimar.
Still, EVA & ADELE were provided with opportunities rarely afforded to transgressive performance artists. They appeared on the popular British TV show Eurotrash as characters known as the Eggheads, and during the 2015 Venice Biennale, they did a partnership with Swatch.
According to Eva, their performance took place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. For that reason, it has been tough to lure their art into galleries and museums, even though they have created photography, videos, and more documenting their activities. But some have tried, most notably the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which mounted a survey of their art in 2016.
The artists asserted that they were from a distant time and frequently made use of the made-up word “futuring.” “We are reluctant to explain what FUTURING means,” Eva said in the 2012 interview. “We prefer everyone to interpret our neologism for him/herself. Primarily it means being active—creating the future.”
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