Art in Brief
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Tim Eitel’s sold-out exhibition at PaceWildenstein marks the rising stature of the “New Leipzig School,” a group of artists who studied at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts in the 1990s. Like a number of these young painters, Mr. Eitel imbues his realist images with anxious fantasy, but his paintings of ordinary people in spare, unsettling environments stand out for their cool premeditation.
Eleven of his paintings in the installation are tiny — less than a foot across — with precise shapes describing mysterious, dark scenarios. In “Tür” (dated 2006, like every work here), a woman in a red coat clasps a folder while reaching for an object hidden by a gray plane. Covering 3/4 of the image, this flat, obdurate gray — apparently a wall in the extreme foreground — contrasts intriguingly with her lithe, detailed form.
Mr. Eitel’s cagey constructions sometimes feel all too staged. In “Rauch” (“Smoke”), two casually dressed people inexplicably pull a suitcase toward a huge column of smoke; the ironic coupling of the nonchalant and the ominous seems heavy-handed. As one of five large canvases in the exhibition, however, this 7-by-11-foot painting shows the artist extending his technical control to impressive dimensions.
With his careful, geometric framing of observed moments, Mr. Eitel might seem a postmodernist Vermeer. Is it mere coincidence that he works from his own photographs, while the Delft master probably used a camera obscura? Mr. Eitel’s colors, however, tend to be less adventuresome than Vermeer’s. His subtle dramas sometimes seem illustrated rather than weighted in the momentum of hues. This effect is particularly apparent in the two large canvases of shopping carts, in which numerous darks mingle indeterminately.
Not so, though, for the 9-foot-tall “Öffnung” (“Opening”), in which school children throng about a couch in a museum-like space. Here the artist strikingly captures the flutter of luminous lights and darks of school uniforms beneath a single, driving vertical of light on the wall behind. It leaves one eager to see what the artist will do next.
Until January 20 (534 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-929-7000).
