Thomas Scheibitz
Masterplan\Kino
Masterplan\Kino
01.02. - 29.04.2018
Kunstmuseum Bonn
Museumsmeile
Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2
53113 Bonn
Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2
53113 Bonn
Images courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Bonn
Photos: David Ertl
Thomas Scheibitz’s work, which focuses on painting and sculpture, has gained in importance and attracted a lot of attention since the artist’s first international exhibition at the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Meanwhile, Scheibitz, who was born in Radeberg in 1968, counts among the internationally most esteemed, discourse-forming positions of his generation.
Thomas Scheibitz’s work owes its relevance to the systematic consequence with which the artist questions the media he uses in terms of their special nature, their performance and the challenges regarding their use. Central to Scheibitz’s painterly and sculptural work is the demand for a new relation between figuration and abstraction. A comprehensive picture archive, from which Scheibitz – in spiritual kinship with Aby Warburg and his Mnemosyne Atlas – combines all kinds of pictures according to formal and associative similarity, provides the basis for the artist’s sculptures and paintings in which he reduces and rethinks plainly legible figuration until it turns into neither mimetic nor emblematic abstraction, in which every elements gains the position of being its own “representative.” During a long process involving the “ambivalent adjustment of ideology, memory and invention” (Scheibitz) picture and sculptural body turn into ambiguous images between autonomous positing and a barely contrivable attachment to the world and to reality.
With about 70 works this is one of the most substantial exhibitions the artist has developed in the last years. More than half of the presented works were especially created for the show and are complemented by a selection of works dating from 1995-2016. Thus, the exhibition paradigmatically makes visible development, consistency and new approaches within the oeuvre
Thomas Scheibitz’s work owes its relevance to the systematic consequence with which the artist questions the media he uses in terms of their special nature, their performance and the challenges regarding their use. Central to Scheibitz’s painterly and sculptural work is the demand for a new relation between figuration and abstraction. A comprehensive picture archive, from which Scheibitz – in spiritual kinship with Aby Warburg and his Mnemosyne Atlas – combines all kinds of pictures according to formal and associative similarity, provides the basis for the artist’s sculptures and paintings in which he reduces and rethinks plainly legible figuration until it turns into neither mimetic nor emblematic abstraction, in which every elements gains the position of being its own “representative.” During a long process involving the “ambivalent adjustment of ideology, memory and invention” (Scheibitz) picture and sculptural body turn into ambiguous images between autonomous positing and a barely contrivable attachment to the world and to reality.
With about 70 works this is one of the most substantial exhibitions the artist has developed in the last years. More than half of the presented works were especially created for the show and are complemented by a selection of works dating from 1995-2016. Thus, the exhibition paradigmatically makes visible development, consistency and new approaches within the oeuvre