Eva Lootz has been living and working in Spain since the late sixties. Her first period as an artist is linked to another Austrian, the sculptor Adolfo Schlosser: together they developed an interest in the artistic treatment of nature, while sharing a taste for materials. Her first exhibitions in Madrid in the early seventies were mounted at Galería Ovidio and Galería Buades, where she made contact with the art scene in the capital. Indeed, one of her first major interventions was pouring paraffin into the swimming pool at Luis Gordillo's chalet. The first period of her work could be described as an investigation into fluid, malleable materials such as mercury, sand or paraffin and their expressive possibilities. From a piece entitled La ruta de la seda-The Silk Road- (1986) a growing linguistic awareness emerged in her work, clearly revealed in some of her major pieces from the period, such as Nit, deien (1987) or Canon inverso (1987). But also from that linguistic awareness and an interest in the way in which language encodes reality, her work began to show a concern with the difficulty of vision, which gave rise to what she has called "vision politics", which may find its finest expression in Farewell to Isaac Newton, which was mounted for the first time at the South London Gallery in 1994.