Thomas Scheibitz Livres

Reviewing a 2006 exhibition of the Berlin-based artist Thomas Scheibitz's work in The New York Times , Roberta Smith wrote, "Stylish and cool, the work... continues to violate the borders between abstraction and representation, painting and sculpture, art and other visual culture. His sculptures resemble architectural models or fragments of logos; his paintings are vaguely figurative. Both seem derived from some outside source, and display a flexible faith in form's infinite allusiveness and consequent ability to inspire free-form reverie." This volume presents Scheibitz's pictorial archive, compiled from a vast range of pictures found in newspapers, magazines, films and cartoons, as well as our collective memory. In making this material available, Scheibitz gives readers a tool to draw many conclusions about his artistic methods in painting and sculpture.

The publication, which was conceived by Thomas Scheibitz as a documentary workbook, provides insight into the lengthy process of creating his largest sculpture to date, which he developed for the Kesselhaus at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art. Examples selected by the artist offer an idea of the complex research materials for this process and reveal some of the associated concepts. Reference illustrations on Hans Baldung Grien, Donald Judd, and Jacques Tati, among others, are juxtaposed with sketches and handwritten notes. In a second volume, the finished sculpture will be comprehensively documented and situated in a broader context in texts on the work.

This artist’s publication is a side project of the concurrent museum catalogue „Masterplan\kino“. Here Thomas Scheibitz outlines a future film project, a sketch that is derived from the manipulation of atelier, lighting and still-life situations as well as misprints and overprints from a previous book project (“Tisch, Ozean und Beispiel“). Illustrations of scenarios and drawings provide further representation of the prospective film. The difference between the time-based medium of film and the “motionless” medium of painting is a recurring theme for the artist, presented in this book on 24 double pages, thus mirroring film’s 24 frames per second.

“A painting or a sculpture is a master plan\cinema”. Thomas Scheibitz has devised an elaborate book based on this statement. It presents, for the first time, works from 1995 to the present, but rather than illustrating them chronologically, they are laid out to make the dissolution of “figuration” and “abstraction”, an ongoing theme in Scheibitz’s work, visible. A visual language of the seen, understandable and incomprehensible world is created.

Thomas Scheibitz ist nicht nur Maler, Zeichner und Bildhauer, sondern auch passionierter und leidenschaftlicher Büchermacher. In einem langem Denk- und Arbeitsprozess mit zahllosen Varianten entstand dieses autonome Künstlerbuch, in dem Scheibitz erstaunlich mutige Wertungen seiner eigenen Arbeit trifft. Als „Privates Album“ bezeichnet er seinen Blick auf 20 Jahre Arbeit. Nicht das einzelne Werk, sondern die Zusammenstellung und das Gegegenüber von Gemälden, Zeichnungen und „sinnverwandte“ eigenen und gefundenen Archivalien ist aufschlußreich und anregend. Scheibitz zeigt, worum es ihm geht.