Born in Wuppertal, Germany, Anke Eilegerhard creates beguilingly hypnotic sculptures that stimulate not only the sight, but also our sense of touch, taste, and smell. A painter by training, Anke Eilergerhard began creating sculptures in silicone in 2004. Her applied interest in the tactile properties of materials has been at the forefront of her practice since early in her career. Even her early paintings featured floral excrescences that extended outside the limits of the framing, in textured frames.  

Anke Eilergerhard’s artwork is created with silicone and a piping bag, a tool conventionally used to decorate pastries. Drawing from pastry decorating techniques as a source for motif, her works borrow from traditions of Pop Art by placing formal beauty and everyday objects on an equal playing field. The exactitude and preponderance of repetitive motifs reflect the artist’s particular fascination with sensorial pleasures. The meticulous accumulation of these silicone “whirlpools of whipped cream” give Anke Eilergerhard’s sculptures a structured and controlled appearance. The superimposition of layers, and in some cases objects, give a monumental, almost totemic character to the sculptures. With their textured surfaces, Anke Eilergerhard’s sculptures stimulate our senses all at once; taste, smell, and touch, rendering the task of resisting the desire to touch the sculptures almost impossible. Sense and sensuality are at the root of these complex constructions, they have a bewilderingly haptic quality. Despite their static nature, her series Crown almost appears to quiver; a subtle sexual quality seems to be emitted. The phallic prominences at the center of these crowns evoke movement: an unfurling or embedding within the depths of the structure.

Both the aestheticism of Anke Eilergerhard’s works and the themes they engage, inscribe themselves within feminist discourse. The artist appropriates the meticulous technique of cake decorating while rejecting the universe of the kitchen; traditionally associated with the female gender, mastering impeccably a technique that many may dismiss as a recreational pass-time acting as a testament to leisure. Her works propose a reflection on beauty and all it encompasses: desire, love, luxury, lust, excess, decadence, etc. Her sculptures expose the fleeting, ephemeral character of beauty and maintain a focus on the ambivalent dynamics of elegance—the disequilibrium and movement immortalized by a snapshot. Anke Eilergerhard personifies these sculptures with the help of formal suggestions and gender-specific designators. Her works are playful and sensual, presenting themselves to the viewer in resplendent, curving forms that recall the voluptuous curves of a woman’s body. Anke Eilergerhard explains: "For me, the detail of the whipped cream is the perfect shape and a piece of heaven on earth". Her sculptures are exhibited and collected around the world, she also recently won the art silicone Tempelhof-Schönberger-Berlin Art Prize, and in 2017 launched a collaboration entitled Sweet Dream with international fashion house FENDI.