Your architectures and landscapes usually seem placeless
and unreal.
That depends. With the
earlier museum paintings, some were indeed based on real museums, which
then turned up in the titles. Later, I increasingly started constructing
locations, in other words, inventing them. In the final analysis, I’m more
interested in the general rule, in a type of architecture or landscape.
Tim
Eitel, MMK, 2001,
Photo Uwe
Walter, Berlin,
Courtesy Galerie
EIGEN + ART, Leipzig/Berlin
© VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
What kind of
experience of civilization do your paintings investigate?
The
civilization that I live in, of course. I’m mainly interested in
civilization’s surfaces and the deeper-lying structures they reveal, in
the representative architecture and the relationship people have to it,
for instance. In public space. It’s usually a matter of representing
power. I find it interesting to observe how people ultimately assert
themselves in architecture. I also have to admit that I have a pose
fetish. I love to observe how someone is standing, how he pulls up his
shoulders or lets them fall. I’m interested in how much psychology is
expressed in bodily poses. I believe that they change, that there are even
fashions dictating them. That’s what I investigate.
In
your paintings, nature seems rather artificial, often abstract and reduced
to surfaces of color.
The nature I represent is an artificial
one. I think I share a feeling with many others of my generation that
nature today does not have an impact chiefly as nature, but as an
artificial arena of experience. It has long since become tamed, it has a
kind of event character, a landscape garden or recreational park where
city dwellers can relax. Hence, it’s the complete opposite of what nature
once was, namely wilderness and the great unknown, a threat we only
occasionally recall when there’s a catastrophe.
Tim
Eitel, Teich, 2004, Photo Uwe Walter, Berlin,
Courtesy
Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig/Berlin
©
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
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Yet despite that, your paintings always recall Romantic
traditions in which divine, pristine nature plays a key role.
That
has to do with certain formal similarities. My paintings have often been
compared to Caspar
David Friedrich. There are references here that I am entirely aware
of. But despite that, my painting does away with the Romantic polarity
between nature and civilization. And I’m certainly not interested in the
divine in a landscape.
Tim
Eitel, Küste, 2004,
Photo
Uwe Walter, Berlin,
Courtesy
Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig/Berlin
©
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
In your recent
works, what were once light-imbued landscapes have given way to monochrome
background areas.
That was a gradual
development. I started with interiors. Then for a while I painted
landscapes – even if it wasn’t as many as some people seem to think. But
the landscapes gave me a new insight into interiors. I can paint them more
atmospherically now. While I was working on a cloud, I suddenly noticed
that I was able to create a completely different mood and kind of space
with finely nuanced shades of grey. I was better able to create clear
forms that are nonetheless atmospheric with the relatively narrow spectrum
of grey than with more powerful colors. I can create harsher fields now,
that is, I place a grey area next to another, and when I place a figure in
these fields, it sometimes creates the spacial impression.
Tim
Eitel, Selbstportrait, 2005,
Photo
Uwe Walter, Berlin,
Courtesy
Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig/Berlin
©
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
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