Exhibition tour with artist Stella Hamberg and Jutta Mattern (Curator of Contemporary Art, Arp Museum)

on occasion of the solo show STELLA HAMBERG - Corpus at Arp Museum Rolandseck, which is on view until February 27, 2022.

“Art is the opposite of general ideas, it describes individuals, desires only the unique. It does not classify, it unclassifies.”
Marcel Schwob, Imaginary Lives, 1896

And yet this second chapter in Eitel’s collection of imaginary lives—staged three years after the first at the same gallery—achieves a marked coming-together, more in the style of Éric Rohmer, and a new proximity between protagonists. In these recent paintings, a sense of touch comes to the fore, an attention for others. A beard is being trimmed, a private physiotherapy session conducted on a bed, a neighborly couple observe us across the landing. The scenes are derived from the fabric of everyday life and at first seem perfectly innocuous. Yet the attitudes, the gestures, the glances of the figures bear witness to a concern that speaks to the sheer necessity of being together. In the heart of the pandemic, which has seen social bonds become a scarce commodity, Tim Eitel chooses to focus on everything that points implicitly to the importance of human contact. If some fields of monochrome still appear, they underline the tightening, narrowing points of view. The bands of color can be interpreted as doorways, yet they always remain on the threshold of an abstraction continuing to haunt these scenes of human interrelations.

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"Phantasma can also be the result of the daydream for example, like you sit there on a park bench, you suddenly have an idea and out of this idea you develop a whole book, a movie or a painting." Martin Eder

In his new cycle of works “Phantasma,” Martin Eder introduces combinations of possible and unreal worlds whose origins lie in the depths of his subconscious. Their incorporation in the Eder cosmos’ symbolic order of intimate spaces, inhabited by chimeras, shadows, and after-images, brings Dante’s infernal scenarios to mind.

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"Close to Home is a phrase which of course simultaneously means things that are very close to us, that are physically close to us, but its also something that is kind of painfully personal." Tom Anholt

In his exhibition Close to Home at Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin, Tom Anholt explores nothing less than the very essence of human existence. His latest works mostly feature immediate family members, through which the artist probes himself and in the process involves us, the viewers, in a refreshing way.

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In her exhibition Eigenbrötler at EIGEN + ART Lab, Cornelia
Baltes' works develop their very own presence in a partly humorously created pictorial world.

(...) The painterly gestures are so exuberant and large that they sometimes leave the canvas to land on the walls. The forms she designs are expansive and generous. Indeed, Cornelia Baltes' work is characterized by a generosity that is displayed in the depth of the colors, but also in the size of the pictures. Her pictures reject every renunciation and negate everything that smacks of modesty imploring to be seen as understatement. It is a lusty, ruthless way to deal with color and form, and it gives the viewer a calming satisfaction. Sometimes one can read a face into the forms, sometimes recognize an arm or a leg. The idea of corporeality is no coincidence: Baltes usually works with vertically oriented canvases that, if one consistently follows the narrative of the motifs, spur one to think of very boxy people. And so her pictures radiate their very own bodily presence; if they were really people, one would gladly go out with them for a drink. (...)

Laura Helena Wurth

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Inside a Screensaver is Martin Groß' first solo exhibition at Galerie EIGEN + ART

Martin Groß' exhibition is designed as a large room installation like the most exhibitions he does before, like at Kunsthalle Rostock or Kunstraum Potsdam. In the Leipzig gallery a wall piece with the words “Is it still Raining” stretches across three gallery walls, illuminated by suspended neon tubes and combined with oilstick paintings. Martin Groß combines elements from language, text, drawing and painting. Cultural influences from music or literature overlap with those from urban space and what it encounters on a daily basis. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue, in this an essay by Anka Ziefer.

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Stef Heidhues' exhibition Backstage with the Modern Dancers shown at Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin

“This is no game. Here there is no interlude. To disillusion you, we don’t need illusion. We don’t play fate. We don’t play any dreams. We don’t play out any plot.”

What Peter Handke introduced in 1966 in his stage play “Offending the Audience” applied equally for the space behind the stage: the backstage area. Here, too, there is no game. There is no alienation effect, no acting-as-if, no public realm. In the backstage area, the roles are abandoned. This area is more honest, more authentic, maybe somewhat dirtier and at the same time more exclusive. For her exhibition, Stef Heidhues chose the title Backstage with the Modern Dancers. (...)

Larissa Kikol

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Maja Behrmann, a young Leipzig artist, gives an insight into her first solo show, which took place at EIGEN + ART Lab

In the video, the artist gives an insight into the approach to her artistic work and into her exhibition cut, cut, collab. She also tells what role plays space in her sculptural work and why she is so fascinated about woodcut.

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An insight to Raul Walch's exhibition unfollow at Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin

(...) For this recent body of work in the exhibition unfollow, Walch introduces elements from his recent travels in Europe into distinct works that hang together in what the artist has described as a multiverse. Like the show's title, the exhibition is punctuated throughout by what seems like imperatives, as language inserts itself with bright colors into what are otherwise abstract bodies of work. Screen-printed works on paper call out "Steal This Flag" or "Leave It Underground", but, in the end, they are purely poetic. There is no obvious reaction to be beckoned from the viewer beyond contemplative awareness. The utopian, post-nation-state, or climate-driven dreams are given a place of permanence in that thought-space as they are pressed down in ink. (...)

Kate Brown

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