Thomas Eller is an artist, curator, professor, and publisher. Eller started his studies in Fine Arts at the Hochschule der Künste of Berlin. After his forced dismissal, he went on to graduate in Sciences of Religion, Philosophy and Art History from the Freie Universität, Berlin (1989). Eller started his career in Berlin. From 1990 until today he has been exhibiting extensively in galleries and museums in Europe, Asia and the Americas. His international awards include: the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Prize (1996), the Villa-Romana Prize (Florence, 2000), the Art Omi International Art Center (New York, 2002) and the Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize from the Akademie der Künste (Berlin, 2006).

From 1995 until 2004 Eller was living in New York. After returning to Berlin, he founded the German edition of Artnet Magazine, artnet.de, where he served as editior-in-chief (2004-2008) and was appointed executive director of the German branch of artnet AG (2005-2008). In 2008-2009, Eller served as Artistic Director of the Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin. He has been a member of various institutions, including the Association of International Art Critics (AICA), a Member of the Board for Creative Industries at the Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, and on the Steering Committee for Creative Industries in the Berlin Senate. Since 2013 he has been president of RanDian magazine. In 2014, heralding his move to Beijing, China (2014-2020), Eller co-curated the exhibition “The 8 of paths” with 23 Beijing-based artists in Berlin. Since moving to Beijing in 2014, Eller has taught at the Chinese National Art Academy, Beijing (2019), Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (TAFA) (2017), Tsinghua University and Sotheby’s Institute (2016 – 2017), and was associate researcher at Tsinghua University (2019-2020). He was a correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Beijing (2016-2017). In 2018 he founded Gallery Weekend Beijing. And in 2018-2021, Thomas Eller was the Founding Artistic Director of “Taoxichuan China Arts & Sciences” – a major new art district to feature international artist residencies, a contemporary art museum and a biennial, in Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of the world in the Jiangxi province. In 2022-23, Eller is co-curator of the 7th Guangzhou Triennial at the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2023).

In 2020 Thomas Eller returned to Germany and started developing an old water mill in Mürsbach, Franconia, as a center for international art, fuelled by green energy. THEgallery is an exhibition and artist residency space with a focus on ecology, sustainability, and migration.

The work is a reading of various parts of the book “Das Paradies der Liebe” (the paradise of love) by Johann Baptist Schad who was born 1758 in my village, Mürsbach. He became a Benedictine monk, defected after anonymously writing a scathing report about the bigotry of the Catholic church at the time. He converted to Protestantism and became a professor of philosophy in Jena under the mentorship of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Thomas Eller’s THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered) was made in the midst of the Corona pandemic, while the artist was in lockdown in China. As so much of Eller’s work, it is a self-portrait, yet at the same time, also an intimate portrait of COVID-19; replicating in its form and content the biological basis of the virus.

Eller projects himself into the frame in a visually and aurally layered palimpsest. The artist re-duplicates himself, again and again, with each of his copies reciting the complete genetic code of one of the first strains of the SARS-CoV2 virus identified in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 outbreak began. But the copies are not perfect. The duplicates vary. Eller makes mistakes in the code, scrambling the RNA sequence here, dropping a nucleotide there….

More copies of genetic code, more small mistakes here and there. Thomas Eller has translated into visual language an approximation of how the virus replicates itself, spreading its genetic information through multiplication, and through mistakes from copy to copy, mutating to create new strains.

Shot on the beach of Catania on the Italian island of Sicily in 2014, THE white male complex, #5 (lost) uncannily prefigures the tragic shipwreck of 2015 which killed 700 African migrants on the same coastline, and alludes to the nearby island of Lampedusa, infamous for its migrant traffic and for the tragic shipwreck which killed 366 of the 518 African migrants packed onto an overcrowded fishing boat in 2013. With the all too familiar promiscuity of news cycles in our turbo-charged information age, these tragedies occupied the media for some days or weeks, only to move on to more pressing concerns. But while the media may have lost interest, the underlying issues behind these tragedies and many others like them will persist as long as  people anywhere on this globe nurture hopes of a better life and follow their instincts to flee hardships of all kinds. Into this gap between the global media’s disinterest and the persistent need to tell the story of people in such desperate situations, enters the space for art.

A man wearing the ubiquitous attire of innumerable professions – black suit and tie, white shirt, black shoes – is incongruously floating in the ocean. Floating or drowning? This is what we inevitably come to ask ourselves as the shot lurches from above to below the water and back. This man perpetually struggling in the sea is the artist himself. In this video, Thomas Eller lives the plight of so many who wash up on such shores.