Eva, one half of the pioneering German performance art duo Eva & Adele, has died, her partner has announced.
“Eva returned to the future today,” a post on the pair’s Instagram page said on Wednesday. “She has left this world and stepped on to the eternal stage. Her faith in the power of art was never-ending.”
Marked out by their extraterrestrial shaven-headed looks and surreal frocks, the duo have been a mainstay on the Berlin art circuit since 1991, when they started to attend gallery openings where they claimed to have landed in a time machine from the future.
Their performance art adhered to the motto “wherever we are is museum” and was non-stop: “We don’t just go and do a performance in a gallery and then stop being Eva & Adele afterwards,” Adele told the Guardian in 2011.
The duo never revealed their real names or ages, choosing instead to define their age by the length of their relationship. “After 34 years, one month, and 10 days, the longest performance in the world has come to an end today,” Eva & Adele’s Munich-based gallerist Nicole Gnesa said in a statement.
In the UK, Eva & Adele were best known for their surreal appearances as The Eggheads on Channel 4’s late 90s programme Eurotrash, to which the pair contributed sketches featuring odd rituals, such as putting banana skins or fish on their heads. “It was video art,” said Eva. “Video art but for six million viewers.”
According to German news agency dpa, Eva died in Adele’s presence at their apartment in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, after undergoing surgery on her lumbar spine.
“We were together night and day, for decades,” Adele told dpa. “Eva had enormous strength and discipline. Art was the highest good on Earth for her. But she wasn’t just strong, she was also especially tender and sensitive.”
Adele said she would continue to work as a solo artist, aiming to complete a long-term project spanning 201 canvases. “Eva told me that until the end: ‘Please keep on working.’”
