Museum landscapes have become a standard topos of contemporary photography. Portraits of people, alone or in groups, standing in rooms looking at art. Tim Eitel (*1971 in Leonberg) has transposed this motif into painting, focusing predominantly on the solitary figure. We see personal friends and befriended artists mirrored in the gleaming surfaces of aloofly styled art galleries. Immersed in contemplation, the figures merge with fields of colour and geometric structures, are inserted into Mondrianesque edifices. If, as Christoph Tannert writes, “For Eitel ... the material and the spirit are not op-posites ...”, then it is not surprising when the Romantic rear view of a figure in the White Cube prompts us to organize mental space as a surface, releasing colour from its figurative function. In Eitel’s paintings, the Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich, meets Piet Mondrian; but his glance, rather than ending at some point in the invisible distance, is now directed at the decor of Modernism. The visionary perception of these two artists is scruti-nized from within the mesh of relations of daily life between people and their environments, in the interplay between colour and form.

In Outlook, Tim Eitel, who studied at the Leipzig School for Graphics and Book Design, opens up a new perspective onto the contemporary world and bathes it in chilly hues reminiscent of a cold-storage room. As Christoph Tannert suggests, the artist has applied mathematical precision to the codification of our physical life, quan-tifiable on a horizontal and vertical scale. And, “simultaneously one is drawn by the figures, depicted with their backs to the viewer, into a paradise of longing that may weigh down the heart a little, but allows the thoughts to fly away everywhere.”

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In collaboration with the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin