Martin Eder: Der blasse Tanz / The Pale Dance

Martin Eder paints the things a serious painter is not supposed to want, kittens and nude girls rendered with Old Master competence, and the watercolours gathered here are where that provocation is at its most unguarded.

Published by Prestel in 2010 in a German and English edition, Der blasse Tanz / The Pale Dance runs to roughly 320 pages and reproduces 152 works at full page in colour, drawn from a decade of watercolour painting between 2001 and 2010. Most are studies of naked young women, interspersed with portraits and the cats that recur throughout Eder's work; the wash technique leaves the paper visible and the figures half-dissolved, which pulls the pictures away from the airbrushed finish of his oils. Isabelle Azoulay, who writes on feminism and erotic art, contributes the accompanying essay.

Eder (b. 1968, Augsburg) trained in Munich and Dresden and lives in Berlin, where he has also worked in music and performance. His painting deliberately borrows from Botticelli, Cranach, Renoir and Manet while keeping one foot in kitsch, and the resulting tension between technical seriousness and disreputable subject matter is the argument his work keeps making.