Thomas Eggerer at Maureen Paley

Artist: Thomas Eggerer

Exhibition title: OZONE

Venue: Maureen Paley, London, UK

Date: July 17 – August 23, 2015

Photography: images copyright and cortesy of the artist and Maureen Paley, London

Maureen Paley is pleased to present the second solo exhibition at the gallery by New York-based artist Thomas Eggerer.

Thomas Eggerer was born in 1963 and studied at the Art Academy in Munich, Germany before moving to the US in the mid 90s where he eventually became a member of the artist collective Group Material. By the late 1990s his focus returned to painting and he has been exhibiting this work extensively over the last fifteen years.

Using a pictorial language between abstraction and figuration, Thomas Eggerer’s paintings are inhabited by anonymous figures that are absorbed in degrees of action or exchange. They are observed from an elevated perspective and choreographed into arenas of colour. Forms of currency such as money, cigarettes or cans of beer are held and gestured towards, suggesting modes of social transaction with intent.

The work ‘evokes a contemporary condition of internal splitting or dis-location’ as discussed by David Joselit in his essay Time Zones published in Artforum in January 2014. He identifies Eggerer’s application of paint using processes of sketching, stuttering, dripping and staining that make his subjects appear at once dismantled and stitched together.

Thomas Eggerer’s work has been selected by Ralph Rugoff to be included in the 13th Biennale de Lyon: La Vie Moderne, France, that opens this September.

Solo exhibitions include Richard Telles, Los Angeles, 2014; Gesture and Territory, Petzel Gallery, New York, 2013; In der Pyramide, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, 2011; The Rules of the Fence, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York and Fence Romance, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2010; Thomas Eggerer in conversation with Jacob van Ruisdael and Pieter Saenredam, curated by Karel Schampers, Frans Hals Museum, The Netherlands, 2008; Atrium, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, 2003; Matrix 148, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, 2002.

Selected group exhibitions include 13th Biennale de Lyon: La Vie Moderne, Lyon, France (forthcoming 2015); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany (touring to MUMOK Vienna, Austria), 2015; Abandon the Parents, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2014; Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland; Kultergest, Lisbon, Portugal, 2013; Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawing Collection, MoMA, New York, 2009; Passageworks: Contemporary Art from the Collection, SFMOMA, San Francisco; Idle Youth, Gladstone Gallery, curated by Russell Ferguson, New York, 2008; Eggerer, Baer, von Wulffen, Augarten Contemporary, Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 2008; The Painting of Modern Life, Hayward Gallery, London and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2007; The Undiscovered Country, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2004; Baja to Vancouver – The West Coast and Contemporary Art, traveling exhibition: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Vancouver Art Gallery, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Seattle Art Museum, 2002-3; and Painting on the Move – Nach der Wirklichkeit, Kunsthalle Basel, 2002.