Tucked inside a single room at Petzel Gallery is Waterworld, a humbly scaled exhibition, yet impressively scaled work by New York-based, German artist Thomas Eggerer. The artist’s work has long been shown in this context, showing only a few works at a time in their enthrallingly large-scale dimensions that further the artist’s ongoing aesthetic tendencies and focus on each meditative, impressively detailed scenario.
Eggerer’s conveyance of visceral desire and its reflections in his meticulous, labor-oriented approach, find themselves skillfully condensed in Waterworld, a work which was first unveiled at the Lyon Biennale in 2015. Ambitiously populated with male figures, all seemingly identical and semi-nude, positioned throughout a boundless body of water, see these bathers facing turbulent waves that bisect the canvas. The notion of terrain plays a crucial role in Eggerer’s paintings, whether its unfruitful, barren lands behind striving, lone figures or abstract formations of color and form substituting for surface. Here, Eggerer’s watery textures are strikingly contrasted with his fleshy pink subjects, contrasting the fluid movements of the waves with the multitude of poses shown here.
To read more, click here or download it below.
