However, just as Guston’s use of muddy pink was somehow inherently, synaesthetically, “wrong,” Eggerer’s use of off-putting colour is muted and restrained; he formally limits the numbers of energetically clashing colours per canvas. The same control is apparent in his choices with figuration, how and where they exist on each canvas. Everyone here is doing something, but what exactly, and to what end remains somehow mysterious. The Street and Yellow Harvest, in particular, are imbued with the language of German Socialist painting, constellations of figures go about their business without care to its meaning or end.

A young androgynous figure in The Collector is on his or her knees bent at the waist gathering... something. It doesn’t seem to matter what it is, it is in the activity, in reaching out to grasp, with a slight smile playing at the mouth, that is important. This figure is repeated in The Street, as one of the few people who are active in the canvas, others lounging about wearing either blue short-sleeved tops or shirtless. Even with a red and turquoise sky, the sense of summertime lackadaisy is pervasive, with two young men carrying a green hose, while others dreamily look on or elsewhere. Where the paintings in the downstairs gallery appear to be a statement of Eggerer’s historical interests in painting, the three paintings upstairs seem scrubbed clean of politics, yet ache with romance. Three versions of the virtuosic pianist, Arturo Benedetti Michalangeli line the right side of the room, the clean lines of the instrument blurred and

marred lovingly against three different shades of green.