Felix Eckardt was born in Hamburg in 1975. He studied Painting and Illustration at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HaW) and at Universidad Complutense in Madrid.
Today he works as a freelance artist and illustrator for children’s and adolescents’ books, for film, television and music productions in Hamburg. Diverse children’s books and specialist art books by him have been published in the German and Spanish languages.
What interests him is life, people and their diversity in urban spaces. As a painter, he captures especially beautiful, quiet moments: small moments in the large city that give pause to the viewer, which one might easily overlook when passing by. In the process of the artist’s search for motifs, those places emerge as a contrast to the hustle and bustle of the cities.
Again and again Felix Eckardt succeeds in transferring that quiet calm to his pictures and thus placing a kind of close-up focus on small details of life in the tumultuous big city. With its sometimes casual, fragmentary approach, his painting style underscores the fleetingness of the moment. By means of his grid-like but spontaneous brushwork, he plays with the light effects and architectural structure of the big city. Thus, when viewed from up close, one often discovers an exciting combination of large and small areas of colour that radiate an almost disjointed, careless character. But the further back the viewer moves, the more they coalesce to form real shapes.
Parallel with teaching assignments in painting and illustration at HaW, he gives painting courses and seminars at the University of Applied Sciences in Ottersberg, the Academy Bad Reichenhall and all over Germany. In addition to exhibitions at various galleries, his works have also been on display in group exhibitions at museums, such as the State Museum of Mainz (2008) and at Schloss Fürstenberg (2011).
His passion is devoted to the experiences that he has amassed when visiting diverse cities all over the world, as well as in his home city of Hamburg. Those impressions from a huge variety of countries and cultures serve as inspiration for Felix Eckardt and appear everywhere in his pictures. Extended painting trips, especially to the metropolises of the USA, South America and Europe, serve as the foundation.