Sonnenuntergang (Sunset) was painted in 2003, Eitel's final year as a Meisterschüler under Arno Rink at the Leipzig Academy, and the year he won the Marion Ermer Prize. It is an early work by the most restrained of the New Leipzig School painters, and that restraint is fully present here. Two figures walk away from us across a flat, pale expanse, their long shadows falling forward into the foreground; the sky graduates from pale blue to a warm blush at the horizon. The setting could be a beach, a salt flat, an airfield; Eitel leaves the ground deliberately ambiguous, marked only by faint tire tracks that give the vast, empty surface a sense of prior human transit. The painting belongs to the early landscape works that first brought Eitel to international attention, predating the more austere interior and gallery settings of his later practice. Caspar David Friedrich and Gerhard Richter are both present in the work's DNA, but the image is entirely Eitel's own: melancholy without sentiment, precise without coldness.