Uta Eisenreich, a visual artist based in Amsterdam, works at the crossroads of photography, performance, and philosophy. Arranging everyday objects in front of the unblinking eye of her camera, she creates playful tableaux that invite viewers into a peculiar game of logic, language, and meaning — ultimately challenging us to rethink our ways of relating to the world.

Contact: hello@utaeisenreich.xyz

Short bio

Uta Eisenreich is an Amsterdam-based artist and visual researcher. Born in West Germany in the 1970s into a family of teachers —a forgetful mathematician, an erratic elementary school teacher, an expressive dancer with golden curls, and a teenage amateur magician—she grew up channeling these diverse influences. As a teenager, she began exploring her interests in theatre and photography, before studying philosophy in Frankfurt Main in the 90s.

In 2000, she graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, with humorous photographic works that conflate these interests and reveal — with tongue firmly in cheek — the hidden rules and structures of order. Since then, she has developed an oeuvre that arranges enigmatic object combinations in front of her photographic lense. Triggering the viewer’s impulse to construct meaning, her images explore the poetic and humorous space between the sign and its meaning. Language plays a key role, but ultimately, her works question our cognitive toolkit as a whole — our ways of perceiving, understanding, misunderstanding, and representing the world.

She has published on issues of analogy and representation: A not B (2010) and As If (2021) with ROMA publications, and her work has been shown in exhibitions and on stages internationally.

Uta Eisenreich is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects, and teaches at Gerrit Rietveld Academy.