Thomas Scheibitz. Photo: Martin Eder
|
Thomas Scheibitz, GP 96, 2005. © VG Bild-Kunst 2012. Courtesy Schmidt-Drenhaus-Stiftung
|
Thomas Scheibitz, Goldilocks Zone, 2008. © VG Bild-Kunst 2012
|
Thomas Scheibitz, St. Johann, 2000. © VG Bild-Kunst 2012
|
Thomas Scheibitz, Untitled, 1996. Deutsche Bank Collection. © VG Bild-Kunst 2012
|
Thomas Scheibitz, One-Time Pad, 2012. © VG Bild-Kunst 2012
|
from Thomas Scheibitz‘ archive
|
|
|
A yellow block rests on a six-meter-high
column. Geometric protrusions and indents pick up on shapes from the
windows on the second floor. Yet the block seems to have a face: square
eyes, a line for a nose, a box jaw. Like an abstract totem pole. Thomas
Scheibitz’ sculpture EX Block, which is situated in the entrance hall of the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, hits the nail on the head. For Scheibitz’ first big museum show
in Germany is devoted to a central aspect of his work: the human
figure. “Finding a contemporary form for this is the most difficult
thing, but also the most important. Intuitively, I’ve always thought
I’d arrive at this sort of result. But it took twenty years for me to
describe it,” says the artist in a conversation with ArtMag.
Indeed, older works on paper from the Deutsche Bank Collection
permit much more concrete associations with objects or human figures.
Scheibitz painted them in the mid nineties during a study visit to
Japan. These early works already contain everything that typifies the
work of the artist (who was born in Radeberg, Germany, in 1969). They
display the characteristic artistic language of interrelated forms the
viewer seems to know from somewhere. And they reflect Scheibitz’
explorative search for a contemporary position between figuration and
abstraction.
“Thomas Scheibitz is one of the most important and interesting painters of his generation,” says Susanne Gaensheimer, the museum’s director, who curated the show herself. In 2005, Scheibitz and Tino Sehgal designed the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennial.
“It was time to give an appropriate place to his work in all its
fullness,” says Gaensheimer. And now Thomas Scheibitz’ universe unfolds
on an entire floor of the Frankfurt museum. The show includes
paintings, sculptures, large works on paper, drawings and sketches. On
view for the first time are parts of the archive in which he has
collected all of the things from which he distills his forms. “If I
were to give a guided tour,” says Scheibitz, “it could start here.” In
this room, which differs from the rest of the exhibition course in
terms of the colors, among other things, his working method becomes
clear.
In display cases and on giant pin boards, a
seemingly unconnected jumble of material is spread out: pictures of
every size and origin, record covers, advertising posters, odds and
ends from the hardware store, a seashell. Like a classical art
historian, Scheibitz looks for formal similarities, no matter whether
the material is a Renaissance engraving or a picture torn out of an
architecture magazine. He also uses films, literature and music as
sources. He mixes up the found forms in his sketchbooks until they take
on a new constellation and, after a multi-step abstraction process,
fuse into something that later can become a painting or sculpture. It
is a condensation of historical, invented and recognizable basic
patterns that characterize visual life today.
This process results in works such as the large painting One-Time Pad,
which, like most of the works on exhibit, was finished this year. Forms
that look like letters of the alphabet are arrayed close to one
another: a gray-yellow bar, a gray “n”; at the upper edge, white spots
float like clouds in front of a blue background. Anyone who is trying
to find a meaning or even a history behind this should think about the
title, One-Time Pad, which is also the name of the exhibition. One-time pad
is a type of encryption employed predominantly in diplomatic and
military circles. The code can only be used once; it is considered
indecipherable. The same is true of Scheibitz’ works. Although they
conjure up memories of images and signs we all know, we cannot decipher
them. It is like a déjà-vu experience, where we perceive something to
be real for a moment but cannot pin it down as a real event. “Today
people expect everything to be made plausible. They stand in front of
art wearing headphones and want to hear an explanation. But that
doesn’t work with my art,” says Scheibitz.
Nevertheless, in
the archive room at the Frankfurt museum, he pins up miniature
photographs of his works next to paintings that are similar in formal
terms. This is highly reminiscent of the tableaus in Aby Warburg’s famous Mnemosyne Atlas.
In the catalogue – which is more of an elaborately designed artist’s
book than exhibition documentation – the artist proceeds in a similar
way. Before the explanatory texts and interviews, tableaus and
facsimiles from earlier Scheibitz catalogues almost didactically give
an introduction to his method and artistic language. This is fully in
keeping with Warburg’s apt observation that so-called “head
images” can convey a statement better than a “headline”. “It’s about
activating collective memory, about things and images that we all know
and can categorize, or at least think we can categorize,” explains
Scheibitz. And this is the aim of his works, which are not committed to
any specific genre, style or other ism. “For me, Warburg’s method of
approaching images from an iconographic standpoint is much more
interesting. I view everything without respect, but seriously.”
This
does not mean, however, that Scheibitz simply photographs the models he
finds in the everyday world, or simply paints them like other painters
his age from the Leipzig School in order to imbue their works with
political or historical meaning. This kind of procedure would be too
direct for his taste, too journalistic. “That would be pure
illustration,” he says. “You need a dimension that is between viewing,
memory and invention.”
Perhaps that is why it was so
difficult for Scheibitz to find a way of approaching the human figure –
close enough to the remembered model yet far enough away. Today he
seems to have indeed found the right balance. At the Museum für Moderne
Kunst, his portraits do not hang on the wall but on partitions in the
middle of the space. Confronted with them, the viewer has to walk
around them but cannot grasp them. In the oil painting St. Johann, human outlines are clearly discernible, and in the painting Henry Stand
a constructivistically distorted masked face looks at us. But who
exactly was portrayed remains a mystery. Perhaps the figures are a
little like the artist himself.
The viewer gets this impression
in one of the museum’s smallest rooms, where two unusual self-portraits
hang: two steel balls painted with oil. Although there are many
correspondences to the human dimension – the balls are suspended at a
height of about 5 foot six, near head height, the light point recalls
Scheibitz’ water-blue eyes, and the red bar could be his nose – one can
cannot conclude that it is a human figure. But it might be one. The
title of the second self-portrait, Goldilocks Zone, points
to this realm of possibility. This is what space researchers call areas
of the universe in which human life is possible. Such
possibilities open up in Scheibitz’ universe. They cannot be grasped,
but they are there.
Thomas Scheibitz. One-Time Pad
29 September 2012 – 13 January 2013
Museum für Moderne Kunst
Frankfurt am Main
|
