Babeland 3 2006 / 2009

Travellers

What in the harbors of the world would be nothing more than a gigantic pyramid of stacked merchandise, turns out, upon closer look, to be a system of individual building blocks. The Hamburg photographer Thomas Eigel has stayed true to his subject of aesthetic abstraction. In an exact 4x4 format, he photographed the front side of overseas containers. The result is astounding: lackluster containers transform into mysterious, quadratic front pieces with all sorts of unique characteristics. Colors, fittings, logos, signs, and other extras tell the story of a trip around the world. One could even say: only the famous racing cars of the 1970s were more stylish.


Stephan Reisner


Vinyl LPs culturally influenced an entire generation. Music as a way of life, an extension of perception, a way of bringing visual dreams and fantasies to life. Spinning the lyrical disc as a door opener to the soul, as the expression of a feeling, more than just the daily world can be found in a person’s soul. Thomas Eigel (*1959), who studied ethnology, today lives and works as a photographer in Cologne and Berlin. His series “Turntables” ably refers to this historical reference of pop and music culture. Eigel plays with the abstract just as he does with the psychedelic from the era. His round-cut objects are optical illusions. Sometimes we seem to lose ourselves in the rapid whir of the spinning, but then we suddenly recognize pictures and shapes that are slumbering within ourselves. Do the circles of color open a space deep within the wall itself, or do they seem to come out towards us? “Design art” is currently the trend. Thomas Eigel’s “Turntables” are a particularly successful artistic example thereof! And evidence of how today’s artists can restore the fundamental thoughts behind Pop art of the still young century to a new vitality and timeliness. Pop after all means nothing more than conceptually and playfully alienating elements of pop culture and transforming them with one’s own vision into art.



“With the work group ‘Turntable’ Thomas Eigel introduces the recognition of the unrecognizable toward the borders of physics and psychedelics. Disassociated from any connection to elements of reality, the work is sharp; dynamic color spirals with high-gloss surfaces. Photographic arrangements with a pronounced consciousness for color tones, digitally cut, ‘Turntable’ strikes the sensual potency of nonrepresentational painting.”



Wolfgang Schöddert