Willehad Eilers

A Day in the Park, 2020

Two-colour print, hand-pulled
50 x 70 cm
19 3/4 x 27 1/2 in
Edition of 35

Advances in access to photography and printing have seen the editioning of prints become common practice. Willehad Eilers studied both at The Rijksakademie and through his long running participation to various skateboarding, music, and street art related cultures. Like many artists of his generation, he distributed works on clothing, album covers, in public spaces, and for a while mined resources from his own Youtube channel. Over the past decade he has regularly produced artist books and prints. For his most recent print, A Day at the Park, the artist used an image of football hooligans rioting in a park. Interested in the way that celebratory scenes can have compositions akin to historical paintings of battles or how simple brawls can assemble themselves as if they are modelling after classical masterpieces, Eilers is drawn to these crowd scenes which can easily be distorted through the act of blind drawing - only looking at the source imagery and not at the canvas or paper which his artistic instrument is connected with. Cast on a light green background, the colour of his own football team tints the brawl, linking the dissemination of the print to the dissemination of merchandise.