Thomas Scheibitz: A Disordered Space

Thomas Scheibitz
Der ungefegte Raum (A Disordered Space)
25 September – 28 November 2010

Opening:
Friday, 24 September 2010, 7 p.m.

Exhibition discussion:
Friday, 22 October 2010, 7 p.m.
Thomas Scheibitz in discussion with Dr. Julian Heynen, Artistic Director at Large, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; 2005 Artistic Director of the German Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale

Galerie im Taxispalais
Maria-Theresien-Straße 45
6020 Innsbruck, Austria
www.galerieimtaxispalais.at

Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck is pleased to present the first extensive solo show of Thomas Scheibitz in Austria. Scheibitz has been attracting international attention at least since his successful presentation for the German Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. His artistic work uses painting and sculpture to an equal extent. The two media constantly question each other and yet clearly follow the artistic rules inherent in each. Here Scheibitz is interested in the boundaries, sometimes difficult to understand, between the figurative and the abstract, and how these boundaries can be broken down. In this exhibition, his sculptures in particular address the question of how figurative material can be realized using abstract resources. Unlike exponents of the new figurative painting, he follows a pathway that starts with abstraction then approaches the figurative via symbolic, sign-like formal language, without slipping off into narrative. In this way he intuitively develops a pictorial art cosmos that does orientate itself towards phenomena and things in the everyday world, but translates these into surprising new constructions.

Thomas Scheibitz has developed a storyboard-style concept tailored precisely to the gallery’s spaces for the Galerie im Taxispalais. Collages and drawings with textual additions allude to the wide variety of formal and intellectual associations on which the paintings and sculptures – largely created specially for this exhibition – are based. The exhibition title Der ungefegte Raum – interpreted as A Disordered Space – transforms and reinterprets the title of an ancient mosaic. In the 2C BC the Greek mosaic artist Sosos of Pergamon created a new kind of floor ornamentation that was emulated for over four hundred years. This was a mosaic form called The Unswept Floor, which showed trompe l’oeil remains of food on the floor, as though left over from a lavish meal. By replacing ‘floor’ with ‘space’, Scheibitz is making the leap from two to three dimensions. This is typical of his working method, which addresses shifts and reinterpretations between and within these dimensions.

Thomas Scheibitz deliberately chose association with the mosaic as a starting point for the exhibition and for a painting of the same name that is being shown in the exhibition. The concept of mosaic technique refers in a complex way to his own artistic strategy, the direction of his thought and his perception of the world.

Lines, surfaces and points are brought together to form extracts, developments freeze into splinters and nuances, details into moments. Fragments of experience, momentary images, impressions of nature, metaphors, language games and word play, circumstances and ways of thinking form pictorial structures like static, prefabricated parts in a sequential style, meeting against a common background.

Thomas Scheibitz, born 1968 in Radeberg, lives and works in Berlin. Studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (1991-96). Solo exhibitions (selected): 2010: Galerie Sprüth Magers London; 2009: Produzentengalerie Hamburg, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; 2008: Camden Arts Centre, London; 2005: 51st Venice Biennale, German Pavilion; 2004: Centre d´Art Contemporain, Geneva; Group exhibitions (selected): 2007: Tate Modern, Level 2 Gallery, London; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; 2004: 26th Saõ Paulo Biennale; 2003: 50th Venice Biennale

Catalogue / artist’s book:
Thomas Scheibitz. Der ungefegte Raum
Ed.: Beate Ermacora, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne
Contents 128 pages + 20-page insert

*Image above:
© VBK, Wien 2010
Photo by Jens Ziehe
Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Produzentengalerie Hamburg, Sprüth Magers Berlin London