BERLIN.- On October 30, the Autocenter, the highly regarded non-for-profit exhibition space, opens the first solo show by artist Thomas Eller in Berlin after receiving the Käthe-Kollwitz-Price of the Academy of Arts in 2006. 'THE ego show - a group exhibition' features works - photography, sculptographs, anamorphic images, drawings and lithographs etc., solely by the artist Thomas Eller and is presented in the form of a collective show.

Not just since German financial institutions have sponsored advertisement campaigns fostering healthy egotism ("My house, my boat, my car", or: "bottom line is only about me"), questions about the core of human experience and how one relates to the world present themselves again. Seemingly having forgotten about post-structuralist theories, that challenged the notion of the unity of our selves, it is suggested to us that we create images that cast a fixed ego position in order to be successful.

Thomas Eller's exhibition is positioned against this cultural context, by presenting varying 'operating temperatures' of visual access to the world. Thematically the show ranges from surviving the physical encounter of a metal diver on a German highway at the speed of 165 mph to intimate (lithographic) imprints of body parts. Between crowds, power and desire the exhibition presents likely intensities that never succumb to the pressures of strategies of identity.

Beyond branding strategies not only in the practice of contemporary art, Thomas Eller believes in artistic research of the different energies of the human body and mind. The embodiment of heterogeneous modes of cognition and intrinsic needs within a person does away with identity politics of all kinds. The location where this multitude is being expressed is the SELF. The irony of the title 'THE ego show' measures the artist's distance to morally correct identity politics on the one hand and frivolous postmodern role-play on the other

Thomas Eller is an artist, living in Berlin and New York. He was the recipient of the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff-Prize and was awarded the Villa Romana Fellowship in Florence, Italy. As of October 7, his works will be part of the exhibition ´No more daughters and heroes´, at the Aram Art Center, Seoul, alongside with works by Katharina Sieverding, Peaches and Harun Farocki.

The Autocenter is a non-for-profit institution and was founded in 2001 by Maik Schierloh and Joep van Liefland and has since presented more than 100 group and solo exhibitions featuring artists like Elke Krystufek, Eberhard Havekost, Omer Fast, Christoph Schlingensief, Martin Kippenberger, Jonathan Meese, etc.