THOMAS EGGERER

Maureen Paley is pleased to present the second solo exhibition in the UK by New York-based artist Thomas Eggerer.

Thomas Eggerer was born in 1963 and studied at the Art Academy in Munich, Germany before moving to the US in the mid 90s where he eventually became a member of the artist collective Group Material. By the late 1990s his focus returned to painting and he has been exhibiting this work extensively over the last fifteen years.

Orientating a pictorial language between abstraction and figuration, Thomas Eggerer’s paintings are inhabited by anonymous figures that are absorbed in forms of action or exchange. In his new work, carefully defined male torsos and orphaned body fragments are observed from an elevated perspective and choreographed into an arena of colour that overlaps and retreats behind these bodies. While the figures do not seem to communicate or interact physically, forms of currency such as money, cigarettes or beer cans are held and gestured towards, suggesting modes of social transaction with intent.

In David Joselit’s essay Time Zones (Artforum January 2014), he discusses how ‘our eyes can now occupy different time zones from our feet or hands’ and that Eggerer’s work ‘evokes a contemporary condition of internal splitting or dis-location’. He identifies Eggerer’s application of paint as using processes of sketching, stuttering, dripping and staining and that through these various movements and velocities his subjects are at once dismantled and stitched together. These figures appear as both alienated cutouts – dislocated from the canvas and as fugitive pentimento – volatile and constantly being redrawn.

Thomas Eggerer’s work has been selected by Ralph Rugoff to be included in La vie Moderne, 2015 Biennale de Lyon, France that opens this September.

Solo exhibitions have included Richard Telles, Los Angeles, 2014, Gesture and Territory, Petzel Gallery, New York, 2013; In der Pyramide, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne in 2011; The Rules of the Fence at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York and Fence Romance, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin in 2010; Thomas Eggerer in conversation with Jacob van Ruisdael and Pieter Saenredam, curated by Karel Schampers, Frans Hals Museum, The Netherlands in 2008; Atrium, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig in 2003; Matrix 148, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford in 2002.

Selected group exhibitions include 2015 Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France, (forthcoming), Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany (touring to MUMOK Vienna, Austria), 2015; Abandon the Parents, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2014; Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland; Kultergest, Lisbon, Portugal, 2013; Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawing Collection, at MoMA, New York in 2009; Passageworks: Contemporary Art from the Collection, at SFMOMA, San Francisco and Idle Youth, Gladstone Gallery, curated by Russell Ferguson, New York in 2008; Eggerer, Baer, von Wulffen, Augarten Contemporary, Galerie Belvedere, Vienna in 2008; The Painting of Modern Life, Hayward Gallery, London and Castello di Rivoli, Turin in 2007; The Undiscovered Country, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2004; Baja to Vancouver – The West Coast and Contemporary Art, traveling exhibition: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Vancouver Art Gallery, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Seattle Art Museum in 2002-3; and Painting on the Move – Nach der Wirklichkeit, Kunsthalle Basel in 2002.