Internationally renowned for his mastery of painting, Scheibitz subverts traditional notions of the medium with radical juxtapositions of color and a unique formal language that lands ambiguously between abstraction and representation.

Drawing from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and popular culture, Scheibitz deconstructs and recombines signs, images, shapes, and architectural fragments in ways that challenge expected contexts and interpretations.

Scheibitz’s practice has been at the center of contemporary artmaking since the late 1990s with early solo exhibitions at the ICA London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, as well as breakthrough presentations at the German pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennial, MUDAM Luxembourg, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and more recent major shows at Kunstmuseum Bonn, MMK Frankfurt, and Pablo Picasso x Thomas Scheibitz at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin.

In an age of infinite images and visual information, the artist’s latest series “Argos” serves as a kind of avatar for Scheibitz. Like the panopticon-esque figure, the artist’s painting and sculpture absorb and dissolve visual material, encoding and decoding, mapping, measuring, penetrating and exploring a pictorial inventory.

For Scheibitz, Argos Eyes are the observers of events and circumstances; that which we see directly, or indirectly via our ubiquitous technological devices, lenses, and screens. For the artist, a picture has always been a summary of different sources of observations and experiences which remain in the mind’s eye like “double exposures”.

The eye, or by proxy the lens, is the entrance to the conscious or unconscious processing of what we see or do not see. A fundamental question for the artist remains the philosophical question: do we only see what we already know?

Scheibitz presents a dynamic range of painterly compositions and a sculpture. Bringing together selections from his vast lexicon of images, Scheibitz builds up these compositions meticulously yet intuitively, using maquettes, drawings, collage, photography, and sketches.

Recognizable forms such as eyes, cubes, droplets, and pyramids are translated into multilayered and complex pictorial structures that urge the viewer to consider multiple perspectives.

THOMAS SCHEIBITZ is represented by
TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY
NEW YORK
Gallery website

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