Thomas Scheibitz at Camden Arts Centre, London

(Text/Interview: Anna-Catharina Gebbers)

On February 21 Camden Arts Centre opened an extensive solo exhibition by leading German artist Thomas Scheibitz. about 90 elements/TOD IM DSCHUNGEL comprises some 30 new paintings, sculptures, works on paper directly from his studio in Berlin and a new cycle of photos. The exhibition travelled to London from the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, where it was on view from November 2007 until end of January 2008. For each venue Scheibitz developed site specific versions: The exhibition in Dublin included a new architectural build made especially for IMMA, while for London the selection of works is modified and an older video with a collection of movie opening credits is presented. With details like these Thomas Scheibitz gives hints to understand his work or rather his artistic universe created by complex visual linguistics: The artist's exhibitions, publications and combinations of works are like expeditions to the intersections of time and space, two- and three-dimensional space or painting and sculpture.

Another key to the essential ideas underlying Scheibitz's work is provided by the title of the exhibition. "about 90 Elements" is taken from the periodic table of chemical components, of which 90 exist in the natural world, and refers to man's desire for order and knowledge. "TOD IM DSCHUNGEL" means "Dead in the Jungle". This refers to two different jungles, the urban and the wild. The double title expresses something of the tension between man's desire to expose nature's secrets and nature's reluctance to reveal all. Scheibitz seeks to convey the underlying principles of our seemingly well-ordered world, disentangling them into abstracted scenes to reveal something of the unpredictability that lies beneath.

Thomas Scheibitz's practise included from the beginning on painting, sculpture and the combination of both as the painted sculpture. His paintings are composed of highly geometrical cube-like formations which are carefully arranged in tightly connected compositions. Although seemingly abstract these works contain often recognizable and reoccurring signs and symbols. Broken and fragmented these images are deconstructed into minimal geometric shapes, organic masses and flat colourful components firmly fixed in a shallow pictorial space. In his sculptures Scheibitz juxtaposes painterly sculptural forms against expansive backdrops, using form and colour to create a dialogue between painting and sculpture.

Scheibitz thus communicates his fresh and stunning vision of reality: Filled with references to everyday life designs, images from the history of art, Hollywood films and glossy magazines a cosmos of abstract geometrical landscapes, architectural components, groups of figures, birds and transformed icons arises. These images derive from a vast image bank of source material carefully collected by the artist.

Meeting Thomas Scheibitz in his studio in Berlin before he departed to London for installing his show I've asked the artist to answer some questions:

ACG: How do painting and sculpture relate to each other in your work?

TS: First of all I make a distinction between sculpture, plastic art and objects. And I make a distinction between paintings and GPs ("Grosses Papier" translates literally "Big Paper"). With my sculptures, the ultimate aim is to create a painted sculpture or painted object. And I hope my paintings never ever illustrate my sculptures or vice versa. For the paintings I either work with a combination of acrylic paint, vinyl, spray, felt tip pen and pigment marker on canvas or with oil on canvas only. The GPs are painted with acrylic and vinyl on rag paper. As far as the paintings and GPs are concerned, I prefer to work in parallel. This means that maybe ten or fifteen relatively large-format paintings are always visually available; they stand side by side in preparation for a specific project. And between them there is always space for new questions and considerations. Each individual piece like painting, GP, drawing, sculpture, photo or book has to be able to assert itself in the combination of things, and vice versa.

ACG: Besides painting and sculpture, drawing plays an important part in your work. How does your drawings connect the other aspects of your work?

TS: I always have to have a sketchbook on me. On the one hand it's like a digital camera to me, capturing things I see. On the other I use it for initially noting down, drawing, or sticking in ideas, things that inspire me. Drawing is an intermediary step, as it were, in the, let's call it the sketching process, the development of a roughly outlined idea. A line is the shortest distance between the idea and the object. A sketch is a model or outline of your concept, expressed in a form beyond language - it is your first guide to action. In dissociation to that a drawing represents something that is apparently workable. A 'technical drawing' - depicting the various possibilities of the conceivable side view, bottom view, auxiliary view, the possible axes and the sectional representation of the three-dimensional concept - can also be an interesting way of visualizing the sculpture as a whole or considering its technical features. Although the drawing may be clear and transparent, at this point you still know nothing about the actual form of the sculpture, object etc. under consideration. Sometimes, however, the so-called 'idea sketch' is all that is needed to capture and convey the experience that follows the processes of seeing and thinking. The sketch becomes an independent entity. Sketches have gained autonomy not only through the visual sense of the contemplation of nature; they also rank on a par with the visual stores and possibilities of technical images. But the sketch or drawing is nevertheless unsurpassed in terms of independence and lightness, and must therefore be regarded as a creative medium in its own right.

ACG: Do your photographic works present a less abstract level of your visual world?

TS: The photos are still lifes -   most of them are views of elements in and around my studio, some show motifs from elsewhere.

ACG: In regard to the architectural references in your work it would be interesting to know whether architecture inspires your work or do you reinterpret architectural signifiers for your own artistic language?

TS: I am not really interested in architecture as such, but more in architectural subheading of tectonics. When a viewer stands in front of a sculpture or other work of mine, and sees it in relation to his or her own physical size, it immediately becomes clear that it is not about architecture as such. Architecture is always related to human scale, to our size as individuals or as a group, to public spaces or ordinary things in the world around us that have been adapted, calculated and made to suit our needs. But architecture of course is a source of formal inspiration for me in terms of how I see and experience a lot of architecture from the 1920s, or also from the present day, where computers play a greater role in developing new inventions and possibilities.

ACG: The publications accompanying your exhibitions are more like artist's books than catalogues. Apart from documentary photographs of your paintings and sculptures, installation views from exhibitions, they contain your photographic work as well as snapshots, facsimiles of your sketchbooks, found images like advertisements, logos or 15 th century etchings. They evolve a cosmos of themselves. What other specific aspects of your work do they point out?

TS: I find it really interesting, how you can combine or organise, as it were, everything you need - this ability to abstract. On the one hand the books tell of these kind of storyboards I have for every exhibition and every project I do. That is perhaps a cross-reference to a structure you have to have as an artist. Otherwise I would probably lose track of things, also in terms of how I run my studio. It's also interesting for example to talk to a film director about how he organises his material or puts things together, how he might have to bring forward some bits of night shots which in the film actually come after the scene on the beach, or whatever. On the other hand I take the opportunity to indicate with titles, quotes, references that the greatest stimulation really comes from things opposite my field. One example is the title and the concept of my book "Spielfilm, Musik und Roman" (film, music and novel), which was published by Damien Hirst in London. For me, the concept of translation is - even if it may sound quite generalised - a very appropriate term.

ACG: How did you start collecting movie opening and end credits?

TS: It started with the fact that I was interested in formal design and certain typefaces. There also was a kind of initial prompt, which was a short newspaper article about the uprising of writing. Meaning that nowadays many things are turned on their heads or reworked which stonemasons or typecutters once tried to establish as ideal proportions in order to set standards, and that things also have a structure, or a reduced and fundamental standard. The way we deal with writing today means that it can be pushed to the very brink of legibility, that something can be recognised as a logo or that altogether things are almost being used in a sculptural way again. If I take something and transform or decode it and use it in a different way, that is almost a sculptural process, and as a sign the writing or script is of course. It's a quasi-reinvention of script in a distinct new form. Another important aspect of these is that the text and image are moving. In a somehow intuitive sense I find that very stimulating. When I spent some time in Tokyo, in the early 1990s, I was barely able to make sense of the language and the symbols. What is interesting, however, is that you don't actually confuse all that many things when you're shopping in a supermarket, or when you use the underground rail network, which provides a kind of guide system through the city. There seems to be something visual or intuitive that ultimately regulates how our world works, something that has also been internationalised, so we can more or less find our bearings wherever we are.

Thomas Scheibitz currently lives and works in Berlin. He was born in Radeberg, Germany, in 1968 and earned his master in Fine Arts in 1996 at HfBK Dresden, where he was student of Professor Ralf Kerbach. He quickly gained international recognition exhibiting extensively in solo and group shows across America and Europe. His work is represented in the most important private and institutional collections of the world. Recent individual exhibitions include Produzentengalerie Hamburg (2006-07), Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2006), and Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Cologne (2006). He represented Germany in the 2005 Venice Biennale, participated in the 2004 Bienal de São Paulo and works of him are currently on view at MoMA, New York.

Thomas Scheibitz

about 90 elements/TOD IM DSCHUNGEL

Camden Arts Centre

22 February - 20 April 2008

The exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre and the Irish Museum of Modern Art are accompanied by a fully-illustrated Artist's Book produced by Thomas Scheibitz:

about 90 elements/TOD IM DSCHUNGEL

28 colour illustrations and 221 black & white illustrations

Essays by Rachael Thomas (head of exhibitions, IMMA) and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith (University College, Dublin), and a conversation with the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London).

Printed by Richter Verlag 2007

ISBN: 9783937572826