Eric Massholder was born in 1960 in Heildelberg, in southwestern Germany.
He came into contact with so-called “workshop” painting, very young, in a way by chance, while his girlfriend at the time was doing an internship in a gallery.
As he says, it was from there that he learned “the alchemy of painting”. As self-taught, his work was greatly influenced by his travels in his youth through Morocco, Sicily, Greece, Turkey and his 3 months spent in India.
He returned to France for a stay with his maternal grandmother who owned a house on the French Riviera. Massholder has moved permanently to France in 1981 where he studied at the prestigious Villa Arson in Nice between 1981 and 1982. More later, he stayed two years between 1987 and 1989 in Paris and worked for the merchant d’art Frédéric Nocera, who commissioned works from him and provided him with a studio and a house in Vaugirard. He also had the opportunity to work for Anne Lettrée in Paris, and returned again to the south of France.
Massholder is deeply inspired by artists from the turn of the last century and great painters like Van Gogh, Picasso or Dali and his works aim to establish
a link between these artists. As he says in his own words: “I kindly wanted give Dali’s hand to Picasso. This wish is the strength of my work. Original
Franco-German and Italian, he believes he took his expressionist side from his father German, his impressionist side of his French mother, and his love for
Revival of his Florentine grandfather. Massholder excels in techniques painting, sculpting, drawing and printing. In his work, he mixes painting styles, from primitivism to surrealism. He creates an unknown, strange universe and fascinating that he constantly reinvents with the use of multiple colors and techniques such as oil, pastel and ink. There are themes and patterns recurring signs to which he adds symbolic and allegorical signs that include the triangle, sun, moon, fish, peacock, pyramid or sphinx. In his works, Eric Massholder condenses his desires, fears and dreams into collections of very intense patterns. For this, he repeatedly uses the same language and the same expression – for example, life and death can be found in the form eggs or skulls in his paintings. He builds an iconographic vocabulary on the fate of society; his images are almost like proverbs – his shark, equates business greed with sexual potency. His monster dollar
denounces the world of international finance carrying death.
Massholder worked during his life on several series that refer to historical personalities, places of worship or major literary texts. These series include the series of illustrations on the letters addressed by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, that on Garibaldi but also that of Monte Verità or the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, as well as that of the Serpent Vert and Beau Lys by Goethe.
Today his work has been exhibited in a number of galleries across Europe including Heidelberg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Nuremberg, Brussels, Ghent, Lausanne, Venice, Paris, Strasbourg, Nice and Monaco. In 1997 he wins the Special Jury Prize at the Montreux Arts Festival. The luxurious edition limited illustrations of van Gogh’s letters are part of the archives of museums such than the MAMAC in Nice or the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris.
