THOMAS EGGERER

Under the title O Pioneers! Thomas Eggerer (1963* Munich, lives in Los Angeles) is showing a group of new pictures, drawings and collages in his third solo exhibition at the Galerie Daniel Buchholz.The title of the exhibition alludes on the one hand to Walt Whitman’s poem Pioneers! O Pioneers! and on the other to Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! But while Walt Whitman’s poem is a euphoric hymn to the settlement of the American West, Willa Cather places a female figure (a settler in Nebraska) at the centre of her novel, for whom nature is not just land to be appropriated and cultivated, but the place where she can find herself.In accordance with the fundamentally expansive, forward-looking tone of the settlement-myth, the figures in the wide open constructions of the pictures face the challenge to act. Heights have to be climbed, long distances travelled; there seem to be possibilities open to both the collectives and the individual. The documentary, seemingly neutral character of the photographs that the pictures are based on is sharpened or transformed: the solid, material composition of the architecture and landscape which frames them is contrasted with entropic material (sand, mud, water, gas). This erosion of spatial definition accentuates the already aggressive, apocalyptic overall impression.