"I think painting is the right place for someone who is both sensitive and ruthless.
Someone who doesn't care if they make their parents happy or if they earn money."
Daniel Eltinger covers plastic foils in paint and forms a collage out of them.
One work can take him weeks - sometimes even months to complete.
“Financially, I never look past the next month.
That's sometimes OK and sometimes less so.
It means no holidays away and the threat of poverty in old age.
The rewards of painting are in painting itself.
Having the freedom to live our lives in such a way that we devote ourselves to this and
find our fulfilment in it.
There's ecstasy and joy in that - in doing the right thing.”
Like many artists, Daniel has problems with the notion of marketing himself for money.
His paintings cost upwards of 1,500 euros apiece.
The larger works sell for around 6,000.
That may sound like a lot, but he usually sells only five or six in a year -
and often has to depend on state welfare to supplement his income.
“This little piece of the world is where I struggle.
The math, the bureaucracy, papers, case workers and contracts - it's like a house of cards
that keeps on collapsing.”
The German capital has become a magnet for artists from all over the world.
But some make it big.
Anyone who exhibits at one of the EIGEN + ART galleries has made it in the German art world.
Owner Gerd Harry Lybke has become famous in his own right, representing some of the biggest
names in German contemporary art, like Neo Rauch.
In this show, the gallery walls are bare, only a bead necklace lies on the floor.
It's part of a 90,000 euro installation.
Daniel Eltinger is still struggling to appreciate what it's all about.
"You are attributing value to all this by coming here to see it.
There's a connection between the object and the space and the value that people place
on the object and the space."
That may sound very abstract, but it's actually quite practical.
The gallery is a business, but it's not just about money...
"Every artwork and every artist has a story.
And I've been accompanying them for a long time, so I walk the path with them, a path
that I wouldn't have taken on my own.
But it's through the artists and their work that I can find meaning, I discover something
for my life that is outside my own thinking."
Daniel likes to go to exhibitions and draw inspiration from them.
But the commercial art scene is foreign to him - although he could certainly do with
being part of it.
“Nowadays there are so many artists that they can take their pick.
You have to have incredible luck - like in a fairytale.”
„The best thing as a young artist is to open your own gallery.
Or several join together to do it.
We don't take on artists as such.
It's more like 'don't call us, we'll call you'.
If something catches the team's attention, or if one of our artists says,
hey - check this out, then we check it out.
But we don't have time to look through all the applications that arrive here."
The art market in Berlin is highly competitive.
Supply far outstrips demand.
There are more than 20,000 visual artists in the German capital...
So far Daniel has sold his pictures more or less by chance - to friends and friends-of-friends
- and a few collectors.
"I don't think I could paint something in a particular way just to make it easier to sell.
The viewer should be able to expect that the painting is genuinely itself.
That it was developed naturally."
"The freedom to do what I want is the most precious thing I have....
And so I'm willing to accept that I can't necessarily compete with the others like everyone else does."