BIO
Christoph Eberle, hyperrealist painter, born 1969, lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. He graduated as an architect ETHZ, began painting in his early youth, was a self-employed graphic designer for over 20 years and lives now from painting.
He regularly participates in solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad. He has a renowned international network of hyperrealist artists at his disposal. Together with Jacques Bodin, one of the main representatives of the European hyperrealism movement, he runs the website hyperrealism.net. He is also committed to the promotion and visualization of Swiss realist painting. In May 2023, the exhibition REAL’23 will present a range of great painters, living and working in Switzerland.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My hyperrealistic oil paintings are created in the confrontation between tradition and the present. On the one hand, they continue the history of the old and newer masters such as Caravaggio, Jacques-Louis David, Caspar David Friedrich, Gerhard Richter or Richard Hamilton. These influences and especially Vermeer van Delft’s almost photorealistic interpretation of reality meet in my work a sensitivity that has grown with the digital and high-resolution image reproduction possibilities.
The paintings are constructed from photographs. However, they are not slavish copies of the photographic originals, but each represent a strong and independent pictorial idea. Light as the medium of visual perception is the main element in my work. Light pours over the objects, constitutes contours, creates sharpness and blurriness, directs the viewer’s gaze.
My works can be roughly divided into two categories: stills (situation) and still lifes (objects).
The object paintings are related to the genre of still life. Painted objects only relate to themselves, the surroundings at best provide the physical stage for the focus. As with classical still lifes, transience is thematised. The objects remain in an artificially prolonged moment before the inevitable decay. They are as if frozen at the tipping point between food and compost, between functionality and uselessness.
The stills are representations of spaces, landscapes, everyday scenes. They are moments in which light and space create clarity and intensity. In contrast to film stills, an event is not condensed in the picture, but a past or a future is created. Something seems to have just begun or to be over - as if the opening credits of a film had just ended or as if its closing credits were about to begin. The static painting latently implies a camera movement to explore the seemingly empty spaces.
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