Eiko Grimberg (born 1971 in Karlsruhe, Federal Republic of Germany) works with text, photography, and video. His art form of choice is the visual essay. The excesses of everyday life constitute a central consideration in many of his works. Whether it’s neoclassical columns and capitals or banknotes and coins – these are the types of atavisms in architecture and monetary transactions he uses to show irrational and unresolved moments.

In three of his key works that deal with the reconstruction of cities and their central squares and public buildings, he highlights the ideology these structures and spaces all contain. In 2013 his book of photographs titled Future History was published; in it he closely examines the architecture of Italian fascism. In the constructions made by the Mussolini regime in Italy, but also in Italy’s former colonies, he identifies a coexistence of the modern and the neoclassical. In his 2017 intermedial work The Pool, he traces the reconstruction of Moscow’s city centre – from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour during the Tsarist era, to the soviet swimming pool, to the return of the church in contemporary Russia.

In 2020 his book Rückschaufehler was published. He has been monitoring the construction of the Berlin Palace since 2011 and investigating its concomitant layers of German history. Within the current reconstruction project, he exposes the various transitions: from the German Empire, to the Nazi regime, to West Germany and East Germany and, finally, a reunited Germany. Eiko Grimberg lives and works in Berlin.