Thomas Eggerer “Waterworld”
Petzel Gallery
This event has ended.
Petzel Gallery presents Waterworld, a single painting show by New York based artist Thomas Eggerer.
Featuring the largest work he’s produced to date, Thomas Eggerer’s new painting, which was originally presented at the 2015 Lyon Biennale, displays a simultaneous winnowing of subject, and an expansion of scale.
While taking cues from paintings concerned with the classical topos of the bather (from Seurat to Richard Hamilton), Waterworld focuses on the modernist motive of the mass in a contemporary scenario, in which labor and leisure have become indistinguishable.
The viewer is confronted with a borderless swimming field dotted with men, spilling beyond the frame, bisected by a foamy wave. In the past, Eggerer’s paintings have often situated figures within abstract painterly gestures; Waterworld’s landscape, at once familiar and inviting, is equally disorientating—here the artist places the viewer just above the water, possibly on its precipice, but without alignment of horizon or shore. Liquid becomes the social field these young men act within and against, building on Eggerer’s decades long interrogation of the visuals of collectivism, participation, and communal social dynamics.
Media
Schedule
from January 14, 2016 to February 20, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-01-14 from 18:00 to 20:00