The artist identity EVA & ADELE is an artwork, a never-ending performance, a construct of two non-binary artists who appear as one. Their biography has no references except for this:
EVA & ADELE – COMING OUT OF THE FUTURE

WHERE WE ARE IS THE MUSEUM.

EVA & ADELE lived and worked in Berlin until Eva’s death in May 2025. Adele is now continuing their art project.
Eva, originally from Austria, and Adele, from Germany, first met in Italy in 1988 and started their joint art project with the seven-track video-installation Hellas (1989), intending to turn the life they shared into a work of art. It was the beginning of a Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] formed by and consisting of EVA & ADELE‘s highly complex aesthetic and artistic twin identity as a transsexual couple. Distancing themselves from traditional representations of men and women, they invented a new persona: bald headed and dressed in the same self-designed flamboyant, extravagant costumes, adorned with jewels, matching handbags and high heels that soon became their trademark. Central to this design were the colours red and pink as symbols of being different, referring at the same time to the pink triangle homosexuals were forced to wear in concentration camps. In performing this new artistic identity twenty-four hours a day, presenting themselves in prominent places like art museums, art fairs and biennials, as well as in public places and in the streets, they created a flashy, friendly appearance, inventing new images of gender while giving expression to their own feeling and understanding of transsexuality which put patriarchy at stake.

Beyond that, their public performances became the basis of an extensive series of photo self-portraits and photographs in which friends and art lovers took an active part by contributing pictures from all over the world wherever EVA & ADELE appeared. Early on, their work was exhibited internationally in numerous well-known art institutions, including the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1997); the Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (2008); MOCAK, Krakow (2012); the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2016); the SCAD Museum, Savannah (2020); and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (2024). These institutions presented complex art installations that not only consisted of well-planned costume arrangements but of an elaborate body of sculptures, videos, paintings and drawings – media reflecting EVA & ADELE’s intricate dispute and thinking about everything that stood behind their transsexual partnership, such as the procedure Eva had to undergo in 2009 to receive formal confirmation of being a member of the opposite sex.

In intimate drawings like the series TSG (Transsexuellengesetz) [Transsexual Act, 2009], Kaktusblüte [Cactus Blossom, 2011] or TIDES (2012), the fulfilling but also stressful preoccupation with gender issues is expressed in a particularly powerful aesthetic which also hints at the heavy, emotional side of being torn apart by regulations, social expectations and prejudice.

Ultimately, FUTURING is their message, in that it captures the idea of imagining an ideal state that will be achieved in the future through redefining gender by aesthetic subversion, not provocation, when they point out that “it is vital to us that the subject of gender transgression finds its place in discussions, in public life, in the media – and that it ceases to cause a stir”.