(Seeboden by Lake Millstättersee 1924–1982 Vienna)
“Weibliche Figuration I”, 1964/65, sculpture, marble, 82 x 21 x 16 cm

Elisabeth Rath, Otto Eder, Figur und Formel, Galerie Altenöder, 1996, catalogue raisonné p. 230, no.109 (with ill) - also see p. 36, two images showing Otto Eder with “Weibliche Figuration I” (Otto Eder working on the sculpture and Otto Eder in his studio at Zentralfriedhof).

Provenance:
Private Collection, Lower Austria

At the centre of Otto Eder’s sculptural topics is the human figure, which he depicts in increasing abstraction, particularly in his later works, through splitting blocks into segments. Curved (and increasingly spherical in the 1960s) and geometric forms appear, melting together the portrayed body parts.

“From the 1960s onwards, the formulaic, the symmetrical abstraction and subdivision of the human figure played a greater and greater role within Eder’s work. Was the content of the repeated forms also a recurring theme in your conversations with Eder?
My method was a fully artistic one, but the method was one on the same level, and Eder felt that, of course. That’s why I was also able to talk as no other might have allowed themselves to talk … I didn’t make fun of him, I had different ways of asking questions, just unusually phrased perhaps, so for example I’d say: ‘Come on, stop now with all these women of yours.’ I was absolutely allergic to them. Now I know that this one is wearing a helmet, and that that’s a warrior, and that it’s always man and woman in one figure. He always tried, I know now, to pack too much into things: into himself, into his life, into his figures…”
Mann und Frau in eine Form verpackt, Peter Paul Wiplinger in conversation with Elisabeth Rath in: Elisabeth Rath, Otto Eder 1924-1982, Figur und Formel, Galerie Altnöder, Salzburg 1996, p. 143