TIM EITEL

The exhibition, titled Tim Eitel: something there somewhere outside, will feature a selection of works that meditate on painting’s relationship to time and space. On view from November 16 to January 13, 2024, this presentation, which takes its title from a line in a Samuel Beckett poem, will mark Eitel’s first solo show in New York since 2009.

Eitel’s practice has been influenced by both European figurative painting and American abstract painting. He rose to prominence as a member of the New Leipzig School, a group of figurative painters that coalesced at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts in post-reunification Germany. After studying painting under Arno Rink, Eitel moved to Berlin and co-founded the cooperative gallery Liga in 2002. For the past two decades, the artist has culled and simplified elements from a rich repository of photographs and memories to create his atmospheric paintings. Methodically layered and meticulously composed, his work centers on precise representation.

The eight new works in Eitel’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York vary in scale, with several works— including the two largest—painted entirely in egg tempera and two small-scale ones in oil. The show will be staged on the seventh floor of Pace’s New York gallery, and all the works on view can be understood as reimaginings, or hauntings, of exhibition settings—including their own. The most direct, clear-cut reference to Pace’s seventh floor appears in Out Where, which depicts a spectral figure reflected in the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Chelsea skyline. This work suggests that the figures in all the paintings in the show move through the same gallery space as the viewer—both the real and imagined visitors to the seventh floor occupy the space at different times.

As with some of the artist’s most celebrated works from his early career, these contemplative, subdued paintings consider the ways that this two-dimensional medium can shape our understanding and experience of three- dimensional spaces—specifically, in the case of this body of work, the ways that gallery and museum spaces are supporting characters in the story of art. Featuring almost ghostlike depictions of tripods and electrical cords, Eitel’s new paintings also examine the presence of elements of reproduction, like photography and videography, in art and exhibition making.

A distinct sense of quietude cuts across all the works in the show, which will be anchored by a large-scale diptych. In this painting, titled Loop, a figure traverses the gallery space as an apparition would, floating between Eitel’s two canvases. As its title suggests, this work focuses on the circuity of both time and movement.

In his latest paintings, the artist uses vacant space or nearly vacant space to explore the relationships between abstract and figurative elements. Departing from his past work in figuration, Eitel’s new works insist on greater distance between the painted figure and the viewer—the result is an emphasis on the spatial conditions negotiated within the painting rather than the figure in and of itself.

Eitel’s work is on view in the group exhibition Österreich – Deutschland at the Albertina Modern in Vienna through January 21, 2024. He was also included in Figures Seules, a 2023 group show at Lee Ufan’s Espace MA in Arles, France. In the past several years, the artist has presented solo exhibitions at the Museen Böttcherstraße Stiftung in Germany, the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig in Germany, and the Daegu Art Museum in Korea.