New Leipzig School: Soliloquies of lonely images

All art lives from memory. This is another word for the images that arise from within us. But the images change, collapse or overlap. Memory seems to be a fluid mass that always needs to be brought into a new form. Perhaps this is what is meant by “afterimages” in the title of the exhibition?

Tim Eitel, born in Leonberg (Baden-Württemberg) in 1971, constantly revolves around this theme in his works: the artificiality of art, which cannot be approached in a naive way to the exclusion of thought, but only by simultaneously reflecting on what we see.

The results of this self-questioning can now be viewed in the Rostock Art Gallery: mental images that intelligently play with the manipulative moment of seeing, for example by means of vertical image divisions and image doubling. The images shown here do not want to overwhelm or capture the viewer, but rather give them escape routes – they can walk past them with more or less interest without being captured by them. Is this more of a gain or a loss in terms of visual impact?

At least 54 paintings and watercolors are collected under the title “Suggestions for Afterimages”. This is obviously about what survives in the memory of the people and objects once seen and what – much later – is resurrected in the work in an unexpected way. As a mere visual echo of what you once saw? In any case, a déjà vu that takes on something spooky in Tim Eitel’s pictures.

The exhibition location, the Rostocker Kunsthalle, further increases this revenant effect. I remember the Baltic Sea Week, these festivals that took place regularly in Rostock until 1975 with the participation of all Baltic Sea neighbors (the event was part of the GDR’s international recognition policy) – but for me as a child, the colorful hustle and bustle, the natural simultaneous presence of East and West, had something of a cosmopolitan Woodstock atmosphere that no longer existed in the late GDR. Of course, this is another retrospective picture that has been exposed several times, because I didn’t know anything about Woodstock back then. The Kunsthalle was built in 1969 as one of the central locations of the Baltic Sea Week – the highly functional glass and concrete building opens onto the small lake in front of it, whose overgrown banks contain sculptures, including “The Ascending Man” by Fritz Cremer.

How good that this public place, which was almost ruined in the post-reunification period, found an enthusiast in Jörg-Uwe Neumann, who has been running the art gallery on his own since 2009. Since then there have been important exhibitions again that consciously connect the tradition of GDR modernity with the present.

A large audience came to the opening of the exhibition, including Tim Eitel, who lives in Berlin and Paris (where he teaches at the Académie des Beaux-Arts), along with his dog, who barked happily to every applause during the opening speeches, his mother from the Deep West and one “Consultant,” which sounds like a close observer of the market situation. There are also several loaners of paintings on site, which are clearly exotic, which gives the whole thing a bit of a horse racing track atmosphere. What more vitality could you expect from an exhibition venue?

Eitel belongs to the so-called “New Leipzig School” This means those painters who came to Tübke, Heisig and Mattheuer. As a master’s student he studied with Arno Rink, and from 1987 to 1994 he was rector of the Leipzig University of Graphics and Book Arts. Like Neo Rauch, Tim Eitel never gave up figurative painting, but he constantly problematises it in his works.

Bodies meet spaces, including empty ones, which in turn resemble timeless surfaces. This theme runs through the exhibition. Eitel himself confesses: “In any case, for me, painting does not go from the eye through the brush to the canvas, but rather I design a new space, a kind of analogy to reality.” Here, the doubling of the image becomes the doubling of the world, and we see a lot of doubles placed in it. The World: Finally a site of mere world simulation, a single fake? This is the form that Eitel gives to the traditional motif of the apocalypse. It continues to destroy all life – but we don’t even notice it.

Works from the years 2015 to 2024 are collected here, including quite a few from the period of Corona isolation. A cold breath of loneliness blows almost serially, so that one almost wants to speak of one of those unique selling points that make a painter recognizable. It is almost reminiscent of the Michelin maps on which a painter based his fame in Michel Houellebecq’s art and market book “Map and Area”.

Eitel wants to design spaces that are broken in many ways. A deceptive scenery. Sometimes there are almost naturalistic scenes, people in everyday situations – and then the close viewer sees that jump in the picture, a minimal shift that says: Be careful, don’t believe the simple images! It remains to be seen whether he is not breaking open doors with his audience. “Square” from 2021, for example, shows a large area that is horizontally divided into light (top) and dark (bottom) gray. Maybe a wide landscape, maybe just a wall that the viewer will immediately walk into. At the very right edge of the picture, perhaps taking up two or three percent of the canvas, there is a vertical line drawn in, like a bar. Tiny colored figurative traces can be seen on it.

This is the world of Tim Eitel. Almost completely artificial, with sprinkles of natural. For Eitel, painting is obviously a form of visual experiment. This is also shown by his choice of means. We not only find oil on canvas or watercolor on paper, but also (self-made) egg tempera on wood. It dries quickly and creates that matt, misty atmosphere that Eitel prefers.

“Reflector” from 2015 can probably be described as the main work of the exhibition. Everything that defines Eitel’s work comes together in this picture. We see a wide and darkly framed image detail that draws the eye to tree trunks and suggested figures. In the center is a bright source of light, a “light” like the one Richard Wagner lets go out at the end of “Tristan and Isolde.” Not a natural light source (not even a supernatural one), but an illuminated umbrella like the one photographers use to brighten up a set. And then we notice that on the right side of the canvas, about a third of the image appears to have been copied, with that tiny shift that is so typical of Eitel.

It is not possible to decide whether this is an open-air scene or just a forest backdrop, such as a photo wallpaper. This seems very deliberately enigmatic. But the magic lies in the eye of the beholder – or not. Of course, Eitel knows this when he says: “The screen then has to continue the dialogue without me.”

»Tim Eitel. Suggestions for Afterimages 2015–2024”, until September 8th, Kunsthalle Rostock