Thomas Scheibitz a German Artist at the Saatchi Gallery

Thomas Scheibitz's vast canvases can be an unsettling experience: the brightly colored surfaces of his paintings manage simultaneously to convey unbridled energy and leave one inexplicably cold. It is precisely this paradox that enables the German artist to so successfully evoke the malaise of contemporary culture. His work hovers uneasily between abstraction and representation, residing within the ever-growing rift between lived experience and mediated image. This exhibition includes an entirely new body of paintings created during Scheibitz's residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA as well as works on paper and sculpture. Each of Scheibitz's paintings features some recognizable and usually quite mundane object or landscape-a flower, an apartment building, a stairwell. This subject matter is then thoroughly abstracted so that only the vestiges of its structure shine through. Solid forms are broken up into jagged planes of color, which are thickly outlined with contrasting hues in a manner reminiscent of the late-nineteenth-century Fauvists. Each shape manages to stand boldly alone, yet the composition never seems unduly fragmented; the shapes somehow coalesce to form a coherent whole.Thomas Scheibitz's brand of quirky abstraction presents a futuristic vision of opulence, where even the most pedestrian subject matter is reinvented as a product of high design. Described as 'post-cubist', Scheibitz's pictorial breakdown of flowers, suburban houses and ski resorts doesn't create actual 'representations', but rather commodity 'ideals'. His architectural shapes and plastic colours reference art history as well as the shorthand of digital compression. His painterly expression takes the form of one-of-a-kind luxury, elevating the media blitz of contemporary consciousness to fetishes worthy of introspective contemplation.
Working in both painting and sculpture, Scheibitz’s reference points are often architectural. His organic forms and sharp angles smack of high design. Suggestions of location are found in patches of shrubbery green or sky blue. Working in washed-out pastel colours, his paintings seem to have faded through continuous exposure to the California sun.Subject matter for Thomas Scheibitz is merely motif, a coincidental starting point for futuristic design. In Kromp, his flower-like form has been metamorphosed into a prototype that fits more ergonomically into contemporary conscience. Starting with a simple generic reference point, Scheibitz creates a vision where nature and technology meet: a better, synthetic concept of reality where the commonplace is reconstructed as a glamorous commodity.