Lot 530: TIM EITEL

B. 1971
STADIEN (ARENAS)

measurements
panels 1-3: 7 7/8 by 7 7/8 in. 20 by 20 cm.

alternate measurements
panels 4-12: 7 by 7 in. 17.8 by 17.8 cm.

each signed, titled, dated 01, and numbered 1/12 through 12/12 on the overlap

oil on canvas, in 12 parts

PROVENANCE

Liga Galerie, Berlin
Galerie Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen
Private Collection, New York

EXHIBITED

Berlin, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Tim Eitel. Gemälde/Paintings 2000-2002, 2002, illustrated on frontispiece & end papers
Berlin, Liga Galerie, Tim Eitel, December 2002 - January 2003
Copenhagen, Galerie Nicolai Wallner, Leipzig, March - April 2003

NOTE

Tim Eitel is one of the leading representatives of the Leipzig school: a group of young German artists reviving painting on the international contemporary art scene. After his studies at the art academy in Leipzig, he moved to Berlin to live and work. While there, along with 10 other Leipzig artists, Eitel opened the Liga Galerie. Eventually, what started in March 2002 as a local artist initiated project grew to become internationally recognized and renowned. Consequently, in March 2004 the Liga Galerie closed as their goal had been achieved.

Unlike his more wild and spontaneous collaborators of the Liga Galerie, Eitel is perhaps the most subtle, as his style revels in the melancholic and ornamental. As Martin Schick notes, "Eitel's paintings combine areas of monochrome color, subtly modified color contrasts and mimetic depiction in a manner which is both unspectacular and highly elegant. His treatment of surfaces and figures is consistent and uncompromising, and his paintings seem so self-evident that it is as if the arrival of this synthesis of realism and the modern approach to the image had only been a matter of time. In Eitel's work there is no borrowed imagery from the vast fund supplied by television, advertising or internet. Nothing is parodied, no courting of neo-pop, nor is another perspective being deconstructed. Eitel has a new view point developed and coolly thought through, with flat surfaces that are allowed to remain as agreeably spacious and empty as they were only able to become in proportion to a human figure set against them. Tim Eitel reduces everything to its essence, yet still achieves the effect of saturation" (Martin Schick, Tim Eitel, Leipzig, 2004, p. 19)