Martin Eder

Eder grew up in Batzenhofen. From 1986, he studied communication design at the Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, graduating in 1992. He then worked for a time in an advertising agency. From 1993 to 1995, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. From 1996 to 1999, he studied under Eberhard Bosslet at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and was Bosslet's master student from 1999 to 2001. Eder is represented internationally by the EIGEN + ART Gallery Berlin/Leipzig.^[1] He plays in his own experimental rock band under the name Richard Ruin et Les Demoniaques.^[2]

In 2018 Eder painted The Unknowable which was sold and ended up in the collection of British artist Damien Hirst.^[3] Soon after, another artist named Daniel Conway became aware of the painting after a visit to Hirst's Newport Street Gallery in London. Conway filed a lawsuit to the effect that Eder had willfully plagiarized a part of his painting Scorched Earth. The court case took three years to reach a verdict, until Germany's legal system decided that Eder's painting didn't infringe on the Conways copyright protections, legally declaring Eder's work a pastiche that lawfully samples from the original artwork.^[3]

The painting also contains the work Monastery ruins in the snow (1819) by Caspar David Friedrich.

"I thought I had to fight this fight because it was about the freedom of art," Eder said. "If you steal something, that is completely different. But within a collage, it gains a different meaning."^[3] Conway has appealed the judgement.