The exhibition includes new large scale paintings, sculptures and works on paper. The geometric shapes, organic masses and flat colourful components create distorted spatial illusions. Scheibitz offers a futuristic vision of a fast-paced consumer society, where nature and technology merge, and realism is replaced by pop design.
Thomas Scheibitz explores the elusive boundary between figurative and
abstract, in both painting and sculpture. Scheibitz was born in Radeberg
in Germany in 1968 and attended the Dresden Art Academy. He is drawn
to a lexicon of shapes and forms that recur regularly in his work: stars,
flowers, circles, globes, cubes, triangles and pyramids, as well as basic stick
figures and faces. Scheibitz builds up his compositions meticulously yet
intuitively using sketches, collage, drawing, photography and maquettes.
These elements are all used by Scheibitz to construct a ‘storyboard’ or
plan for a new series of work. With a digital camera he collects images
of signs, designs and all manner of visual material, which, with found
imagery from books or magazines, are often turned into drawings
or collages.
These sources range all the way from an ancient Roman
fresco, to a comic book, to a handbag advertisement. Dieter Schwartz
describes Scheibitz’s collection as a search: ‘what Scheibitz is hoping to
discover is the suggestion of something that might as easily be found in
the styling of an advertisement as in a Gothic votive picture, a quality
that cannot be formulated with anything but visual means and that
inextricably transforms the found clipping into a thrilling event’. Over
the years this image bank has been built into a huge ‘archive’ of visual
material – which is stored for future use and can be referred back to at any time. This source material nevertheless has to be so transformed and
synthesised within the image as to be fully integrated into the forms and
indistinguishable from its origins – becoming instead part of the system of
symbols and dynamic geometrics in his finished paintings and sculptures.
The title of this exhibition gives plenty of clues about the work of
Thomas Scheibitz. ‘about 90 elements’ refers to the periodic table: the
90 or so elements that make up the stuff of the world. The second part
comes from a headline referring to a Werner Herzog movie, roughly
translated as ‘dead in the jungle’. Perhaps this allusion to a Herzog film
can be summarised roughly as ‘man versus nature’ – remember Herzog’s
film Fitzcarraldo? What this enigmatic title suggests is that not only do
Thomas Scheibitz’s paintings and sculptures oscillate between abstraction
and figuration, more unusually and significantly they also oscillate
between the worlds of art and science, culture and nature.
This involvement with science was most apparent in Scheibitz’s
sculptural contribution to the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
in 2005 entitled Der Tisch, der Ozean und das Beispiel (The table, the
ocean and an example). It was at that point that the artist’s plans and
ideas for that ambitious work suggested he was wrestling with ‘big’
science questions of time and space, gravity and matter, creating complex
structures, forms and voids in space and that the principles of physics as
well as aesthetics were affecting his decisions. Scheibitz sets himself a problem regarding the interrelationship of colour, space, form and light
and then solves it – first with sketches, then with drawings or models
and finally in paintings and sculptures.
Scheibitz’s meticulous planning
extends not just through his archive of preparatory materials but also to
his interest in exhibition design and layout, and his passion for graphic
design: in the past he’s either designed his own catalogues or heavily
influenced them – not for him the attitude of the painter whose interest
ends at the edges of the canvas.
Scheibitz’s studio is divided into two halves – like the left and right brain –
performing different but interrelated functions, he has a space for painting
and a space for sculpture. The sculpture studio is crowded with unpainted
sculptures: a room dedicated to pure structure without colour: cones,
cubes, spheres, pyramids, and numerous hybrid forms jostle together - the
building blocks of the three dimensional world. Next door is the painting
studio, where paint is applied not only to canvas but also to the wooden
forms Scheibitz has fashioned.
Scheibitz follows in a select line of painter/sculptors – i.e. those
who not only work in both media (there are numerous examples: Henri
Matisse from the past, Thomas Helbig from the present) but a more select
band who have painted the surface of their sculptures: from Jean Arp to
Georg Baselitz. Most art history in the West is predicated upon a search
for purity and essence and this is particularly true in attitudes towards
sculpture. Indeed the Renaissance misreading of classical sculpture and
architecture as colour-free verges on anticipating the modernist notion of
truth to materials. Most post-renaissance art until the twentieth century
viewed painting on sculpture as either primitive or kitsch or both. In the
twentieth century abstraction allowed for the return of colour to sculpture.
Scheibitz has developed his own grammar for painting on sculpture,
which like his paintings, bows simultaneously to a residual interest in
illusionism and representation and at the same time relishes the drips,
splashes and material traces that are the legacy of painterly modernism.
Indeed the whole point of painted sculpture rests upon it being a real
object in space, which simultaneously inhabits an ‘artificial world’,
by virtue of its disguised and painted exterior and its imagined and
constructed form. It therefore exists in that realm of ‘second nature’
that Scheibitz describes as the location of his work: the paint helps to
suggest that the sculpture has a correlative in the ‘real’ world, while
simultaneously undermining any such belief. For example in Shaker
Bau, 2006 the painting of the triangular vertical beside the house
suggests a tree or chimney, but the haphazard application destroys any suggestion of illusionism.
The application of paint follows the formal logic
of the structure, which in a subtle way behaves like the suggestions of
representation in the paintings – a series of barely visible props or anchors
referring to the real world: for example interior spaces and undersides are
often painted darker shades to suggest shadow as in Sir Louise M., 2007.
All Scheibitz’s paintings, sculptures and works on paper function
together as one collective oeuvre: they are interrelated exercises in time
and space, form and colour, in which the surface is scored with drips and
erasures and in which materiality and representation are overlayed and
interpenetrated. As Dieter Schwartz so neatly describes it, in Scheibitz’s
world, of painting, sculpture or drawing ‘the window opens onto an
impenetrable, splintered reality whose only certainty lies in the pictorial
surface itself ’.
Emma Dexter, curator at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Thomas Scheibitz lives and works in Berlin. He studied at Hochschule
für Bildende Künste in Dresden and came to international prominence
with his first solo exhibition Low Sweetie, 1999 at the ICA in London.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Blick über ein bewohntes Tal’ (View
over a populated valley), Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2006);
‘Low Sweetie Omega House’, Produzentengalerie Hamburg (2006); ‘Casa
Amalia Index’, Sprüth Magers, Cologne (2006); 51st Venice Biennale,
German Pavilion [with Tino Sehgal] (2005). Recent group exhibitions
include ‘The Artist’s Dining Room’, Tate Modern, London (2007); ‘The
Addition’, curated by Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Gagosian Gallery, Berlin
(2005); ‘Drawing from the Modern 1975–2005’, The Museum of Modern
Art, New York (2005); ‘An Aside’, Camden Arts Centre, London (2005).
In 2003 Scheibitz established the publishing company DIAMONDPAPER
with Karsten Heller. It presents a variety of artistic ideas in a
large format edition brochure. Scheibitz’s artist’s book, Negative Day
was published as a limited edition by the company in 2006.
Thomas Scheibitz is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New
York; Galerie Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Cologne, Munich, London
and Produzentengalerie Hamburg.
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road - London