Lot 104: Tim Eitel (b. 1971)

Mondrian (blau/weiß)
signed, titled and dated 'Tim Eitel Mondrian 2001' (on the reverse)
oil and acrylic on canvas
59 x 78 3/4 in. (150 x 200cm.)
Painted in 2001

Stuttgart, Galerie Rainer Wehr, MenschenBilder 2001, November 2001-February 2002.
Berlin, Kunstallianz An den Treptowers, Tim Eitel, Cornelius Völker, Matthias Weischer. Drei Positionen zur Malerei, 2003.

M. Stegmann (ed.), Tim Eitel. Terrain, exh. cat., Kunstverein Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen 2004 (illustrated in colour, p. 54).

Galerie Rainer Wehr, Stuttgart.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE GERMAN COLLECTION

Among the 'Neue Leipziger Schule', as the group of artists including Matthias Weischer, Martin Kobe, David Schnell and Tim Eitel and others has come to be known, Eitel is unique: on the surface, his method of arranging geometrical planes of colour which appear to blend into one another but whose sharp edges hold them apart has something in common with his fellow Leipzig artists' working methods. However, this is where any confluence ends. The icy detachment and the cool incorporation of myriad art historical references evident in his painting deliberately leave no narrative surprises lying in wait for the viewer.

In Mondrian (blau/weiß), Eitel places a figure seen from behind in front of a constructed paraphrase of a Mondrian painting. The radicality of Mondrian's utopian vision, where reduction of form was seen to be a plausible provocation to considering a new, ideal, society beyond the confining realm of art, is here reduced to a graphic, decorative backdrop, a clever footnote in art history, that intrudes on an otherwise figurative painting. Citing both the modern and the realist at the same time, Eitel is not seeking to create an existential state in his painting, where the human being is a subject in an indifferent and often ambiguous universe, but rather to use this material as fodder for his endless and extraordinarily precise painterly play with form.

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