Tim Eitel: something there somewhere outside
Pace Gallery, New York
November 17, 2023 – January 13, 2024
Pace presents a focused exhibition of new paintings by Tim Eitel at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The exhibition, titled Tim Eitel: something there somewhere outside, features a selection of works that meditate on painting’s relationship to time and space. This presentation, which takes its title from a line in a Samuel Beckett poem, marks Tim Eitel’s first solo show in New York since 2009.
Tim Eitel’s practice has been influenced by both European figurative painting and American abstract painting. He rose to prominence as a member of the New Leipzig School, a group of figurative painters that coalesced at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts in post-reunification Germany. After studying painting under Arno Rink, Tim Eitel moved to Berlin and co-founded the cooperative gallery Liga in 2002. For the past two decades, the artist has culled and simplified elements from a rich repository of photographs and memories to create his atmospheric paintings. Methodically layered and meticulously composed, his work centers on precise representation.
The eight new works in Tim Eitel’s exhibition with Pace in New York vary in scale, with several works— including the two largest—painted entirely in egg tempera and two small-scale ones in oil. The show is staged on the seventh floor of Pace’s New York gallery, and all the works on view can be understood as reimaginings, or hauntings, of exhibition settings—including their own. The most direct, clear-cut reference to Pace’s seventh floor appears in Out Where, which depicts a spectral figure reflected in the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Chelsea skyline. This work suggests that the figures in all the paintings in the show move through the same gallery space as the viewer—both the real and imagined visitors to the seventh floor occupy the space at different times.
As with some of the artist’s most celebrated works from his early career, these contemplative, subdued paintings consider the ways that this two-dimensional medium can shape our understanding and experience of three- dimensional spaces—specifically, in the case of this body of work, the ways that gallery and museum spaces are supporting characters in the story of art. Featuring almost ghostlike depictions of tripods and electrical cords, Tim Eitel’s new paintings also examine the presence of elements of reproduction, like photography and videography, in art and exhibition making.
A distinct sense of quietude cuts across all the works in the show, which is anchored by a large-scale diptych. In this painting, titled Loop, a figure traverses the gallery space as an apparition would, floating between Tim Eitel’s two canvases. As its title suggests, this work focuses on the circuity of both time and movement.
In his latest paintings, the artist uses vacant space or nearly vacant space to explore the relationships between abstract and figurative elements. Departing from his past work in figuration, Tim Eitel’s new works insist on greater distance between the painted figure and the viewer—the result is an emphasis on the spatial conditions negotiated within the painting rather than the figure in and of itself.
Tim Eitel’s work is on view in the group exhibition Österreich – Deutschland at the Albertina Modern in Vienna through January 21, 2024. He was also included in Figures Seules, a 2023 group show at Lee Ufan's Espace MA in Arles, France. In the past several years, the artist has presented solo exhibitions at the Museen Böttcherstraße Stiftung in Germany, the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig in Germany, and the Daegu Art Museum in Korea.
TIM EITEL (1971, Leonberg, Germany) conveys a deep command of color, technique, and form in his figurative paintings inspired by his observations of contemporary life and art history. 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. Tim Eitel has participated in over fifty group exhibitions and twenty 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); Kasteel Wijlre, Netherlands (2018); Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Germany (2019); and Daegu Art Museum, South Korea (2020). Eitel‘s work is held in numerous important collections, including the Albertina, Vienna; ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Daegu Art Museum, South Korea; Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany; Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.
PACE GALLERY NEW YORK
540 West 25th Street, New York City
