TIM EITEL

Born in 1971 in Leonberg, Deutschland
Lives and works between Berlin and Paris

Tim Eitel has been using his painting to create analogies to reality, by constructing fictitious parallel worlds from situations that have been seen and experienced. His pictures are based on encounters, photographically-captured objects or spaces that actually exist. Eitel’s pictures tell no stories, instead they present a moment in which no before and after exist, defined by the constellation of figures in the space, the fall of light in architectural surroundings and the relations of colours to each other. Tim Eitel’s pictures are a continuous investigation of the perception of space, light and temporality, testing the possibilities for painting to depict these elements.

He studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig from 1997 to 2001 and was a Meisterschüler (Master Student) of Professor Arno Rink from 2001 through 2003. He has received a number of prestigious awards throughout his career, including the Landesgraduiertenstipendium, Saxonia, Germany (2002) and the Marion Ermer Preis (2003). Cofounder of the collective Galerie LIGA in Berlin, he was one of the leading protagonists of the New Leipzig School before gaining a reputation as one of the most important painters of his generation.

He has participated in more than fifty group exhibitions and some thirty monographic exhibitions worldwide since 2000, including at the Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen, Switzerland (2004); Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2005); Kunsthalle Tübingen (2008); Rochester Art Center, Minnesota (2013); Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria (2013); and Kasteel Wijlre, Netherlands (2018); Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Germany (2019); Daegu Art Museum, Corée du Sud (2020); and soon in the Museum Böttcherstraße in Bremen (2022).

Eitel‘s work is held in numerous important collections, including the Albertina, Vienna; ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany; Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Since 2015, he teaches at Beaux-Arts de Paris.

He is also represented by Eigen+Art ( Berlin/Leipzig) and Pace Gallery.

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For nearly twenty years Tim Eitel has been using his painting to create analogies to reality, by constructing fictitious parallel worlds from situations that have been seen and experienced. His pictures are based on encounters, photographically-captured objects or spaces that actually exist. The protagonists encountered are also often acquaintances or companions of the artist. Each of these experiences is reduced down to a significant essence. The ambivalence of the pure colour as a large-surface, abstract form as with a black wall that determines the majority of the picture, and colour as a motif, as atmosphere and feeling of space permeates his work from the beginning onwards. Eitel’s pictures tell no stories, instead they present a moment in which no before and after exist, defined by the constellation of figures in the space, the fall of light in architectural surroundings and the relations of colours to each other.

Tim Eitel’s pictures are a continuous investigation of the perception of space, light and temporality, testing the possibilities for painting to depict these elements. The artist consciously employs reflections on the ground or uses shadows to reveal a landscape as an image within an image. There is often a moment of uncertainty when a figure is reproduced via its mirroring shadow in the picture and begins to transcend, a window reveals itself to be a simple combination of lines and rectangles or the figures almost dissolve into the darkness of almost wholly black spaces.

In recent years Tim Eitel has focused increasingly on the neurological side of seeing, with these thoughts influencing his latest works. What do we really see and what does the brain construct, the memory of images subconsciously add?