FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening reception: Saturday, October 9, 6–8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the first New York solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Thomas Eggerer. The exhibition will include new paintings, drawings and collages.

The visual experience in Eggerer's paintings is stunning: the viewer cannot reconcile the exact location of figure and ground, architecture or brushstroke. All the pentimenti are visible, the construction of the architecture in these pictures is not detailed but rather emphasizes the structure of the painting as a space of possibility. Each painting follows a different approach to color as an underlying theme whether the dominating ground is green or pink or orange/brown. This analytic practice constitutes how the figures are placed within the picture without letting the painting as a whole fall into fragments. Every hint of a narrative is first suggested and then interrupted by Eggerer's fragmentation.

A reoccurring motif in Eggerer's paintings is groups of people in an architectural setting. Their faces are not particularly rendered but portray a delicate balance between the individual and archetypal.

The drawings in the exhibition further exemplify Eggerer's interest in carefully constructing images according to a visually twisted logic. The first impression is that they are studies for paintings but soon after the viewer realizes the artist's re-evaluation of details and structure in two almost identical works. The exhibition will also include never before exhibited collages their sources coming from European and American magazines. The collages suggest a pictorial archive that inspires Eggerer's works on canvas and paper.

Thomas Eggerer was born in 1963 in Munich, Germany and studied painting at the Art Academy in Munich. In the mid 1990s, he collaborated with classmate Jochen Klein on a series of conceptually oriented projects dealing with questions of identity and public space. After his move to New York he joined Group Material, an artist's collective in the 1990s.
For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.