Tim Eitel

Tim Eitel, Hunger (installation view), 2009. Photograph by Thierry Bal 

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Tim Eitel (b.1971, Germany) features amongst the painters generally included in the so-called New Leipzig School, an art phenomenon originating during the ‘90s in East Germany, named after the eponymous renowned art academy. This movement has consolidated over the course of the last decade and it has now achieved international recognition. 

Whilst figurative art was generally addressed as passé in most other European capitals, the artists conventionally associated to this group pursued this apparently reactionary strand, successfully managing to bring figurative representation again to the fore by newly declining it within a more contemporary frame. 

Eitel’s process generally starts with a visual survey of his surroundings. During this phase he crystallises his impressions by taking snap shots of compositions that unexpectedly manifest to his attention. He then extrapolates from each photograph certain parts and components of the image that, once isolated from the rest of the context, become the core element of his pictorial investigation. The sense of abandonment, alienation and estrangement achieved by means of this selective process creates a poetic tension between the “reality” initially photographed and its meticulous pictorial de-contextualised rendering. Eitel’s almost Caravaggesque depictions of the humanscape that populates the interstices of the city are moving and analytical at once. They anyhow refuse to indulge in any form of pietism.

Tim Eitel at Liverpool Biennial 2010

Hunger, 2009
Oil on Canvas  
Exhibited at 52 Renshaw Street