Lou Eberhard
“Like Louise Bourgeois and her spiders, my eels are visual metaphors for the transgender experience. Eels live free of the pressures of a gendered existence until their last years when they become silver eels. Through a divine alchemy what is hidden and dull is transformed into a shining and effervescent form. I am in the eels as they are in me; two kindred souls depicted alongside each other as equals.”
Lou Eberhard is a transgender artist whose work focuses on the toxicity of prescribed gender norms, the intersection of myth and science, and how a body can be a vessel for transformation. Acting as self-manufactured myths, his drawings map the topography of an identity breaking free from the ties to the perceptions of society. Through an iconoclastic pantheon of imaginary patron saints, a congregation of eels as disciples, and reflections on formations of family versus community, the gospel of his lived experience is given life.
Eberhard received his BS in Studio Art from Marist College in 2016, and his MFA in Drawing from the New York Academy of Art in 2018; in addition, he spent a semester at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK, as part of a foreign exchange program. He has participated in many artist residencies both nationally and internationally, including at the Vermont Studio Center in 2019. His work has been in exhibitions in the United States as well as internationally, including in Venice, Italy during the 2015 Venice Biennale. Eberhard currently lives with his partner and their two cats in Princeton, NJ.
