Berlin-based artist Thomas Scheibitz is among the most important German painters and sculptors of his generation. Since the early 1990s, he has developed a kind of conceptual painting and sculpture that draws upon art-historical references. At the heart of his work is a search for a new relationship between figuration and abstraction.

The search leads him to not only pushing the limits of his media, but also to question the contemporary relevance of this traditional antagonism between the two poles.

The starting point for Scheibitz’s artistic practice is a steadily growing collection of archival material that resembles a loose visual grammar of the present. It includes art historical reproductions, pictures from fashion, music and popular magazines, his own photographs and much more.

The artist draws on this archive for his work and his motifs range from houses and other kinds of architecture to landscapes, typographic letters, playing cards, portraits, still lifes and Japanese manga.

The resulting images are singular entities that are at once figure and form, object and sign. Scheibitz explores an interface between autonomous compositions and barely recognizable reference to reality – between figuration and abstraction.

The repertoire of recurring, yet varying biomorphic and constructivist forms in the artist’s works can sometimes seem like an indecipherable system of signs. The work creates an illusion of order only to destroy it at the same time. In a parallel layer of meaning the works’ titles often reference scientists, musicians, authors, places or events that are related to the various systems the artist applies and hold significance for Scheibitz’s conceptual work.

Thomas Scheibitz became known to a worldwide audience with his central installation in the German Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. He is one of the best artists “I could find in my country,” wrote curator Julian Heynen in the Biennale catalog, and Scheibitz continues to live up to this high esteem in his work today.

The list of his exhibitions is impressive and international, accompanied by extensive catalogs, publications and artist books, such as “Masterplan\kino” at Kunstmuseum Bonn and Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, 2018 or “Pablo Picasso x Thomas Scheibitz” at Museum Berggruen, Nationalgalerie Berlin, 2019/2020.

Thomas Scheibitz, *1968 in Radeberg, lives and works in Berlin and has been represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and SprüthMagers, Berlin, London, Los Angeles since the beginning of his international career.

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