Like Lovers Do: Katelyn Eichwald

Cob Gallery is proud to present Like Lovers Do, the debut UK solo exhibition by American artist Katelyn Eichwald. Featuring new paintings on canvas, hessian, and linen, alongside a suite of collage on paper, this exhibition draws the viewer into a private, votive space—part shrine, part mirage—where the emotional architecture of adolescence flickers between memory and invention. Like the title borrowed from an Elias Rønnenfelt song, Like Lovers Do is a reverie.

 

Eichwald's paintings emerge from the thresholds of girlhood—not as biography or identity, but as atmosphere. They are emotional transcriptions of secrets folded into a diary, snapshots of yearning suspended between innocence and desire. Her works don’t reproduce stereotypes of youth so much as they replay the psychic theatre behind them: the bedroom, the fan magazine, the daydream. She conjures a world where romantic tropes  become devotional objects, and private obsessions take on the lace of lingerie as much as the texture of myth.

 

At the heart of this world is a girl who never speaks directly. She writes letters she’ll never send, pastes images of her idols beside her own reflection, draws herself into scenes that never happened. She’s chipped her nail polish and blurred the VHS tape, but she keeps rewinding. Her longing is vivid, but oddly impersonal—more about the wanting than the having. She wants to want, more than she wants to be wanted. Her rosary is neither sacred nor secular but hangs in a mirror: a symbol of devotion to something unnamed.

 

She moves between fragments—Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho, Winona Ryder chain-smoking in Reality Bites, Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty. The references aren’t nostalgic, they’re talismanic. Not about the past, but about projection: how it feels to idolise someone, or want to be someone else, or imagine yourself as a silhouette in someone else’s fantasy. She doesn’t want the boy—she wants the yearning. The fandom is the feeling.

In Eichwald’s world, pleasure doesn’t resolve—it hovers. The aesthetic of love becomes an end in itself, where the yearning is more real than any touch. Her figures—half-girls, half-icons—are painted in blush pinks and baby blues, surrounded by drifting curtains and floating talismans. She’s both princess and martyr, ballerina and broken girl, drawn to the poetry of shipwrecks and tragic backstories. This is a Goya painting of a woman fainting, a Redon flower trembling in the dark.

 

The tone is part romance, part masquerade. A girl in her childhood bedroom, caught between Brontë and The Talented Mr. Ripley, scrolling through obsessions she can’t speak aloud. She is every girl who ever watched from the window, her desires blurry, aestheticised, a little ashamed. But her longing is powerful—its very disconnection becomes a kind of protection. She is soft but not fragile, dramatic but not tragic. She lingers, loops, rewinds.