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About Thomas Scheibitz and his art

Text written by Patricia Ellis

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.

Berlin-based artist Thomas Scheibitz blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and is often described as a 'post-cubist'. Recognisable imagery of landscape, architecture and still life appear within his abstracted canvases. Broken and fragmented, these images are deconstructed to mere formalist devices: geometric shapes, organic masses and flat colourful components from which he creates highly distorted spatial illusion.

Thomas Scheibitz works from an expansive image bank containing thousands of impersonal pictures collected from media sources. He uses painting as a means to explore the network of cultural signifiers of public consciousness. Painting from artificial representations, Scheibitz deconstructs the original image even further. His work operates as a lexicon for the interpretation of fast-paced consumer society.

Thomas Scheibitz's paintings celebrate the collective over the individual. Through abstraction, he offers a futuristic vision where nature and technology merge, and realism is replaced by the higher aesthetic truth of pop design.

Broken down into utilitarian components of colour and shape, Thomas Scheibitz strips his subjects of all extraneous detail and reconstitutes them as pure information. Banal subjects such as houses, plants and mountains are made to seem uncanny and emotionally isolating. They are not representations but ideals: prototypical, pristine and cognitively interconnected.

Simultaneously familiar and strange, his paintings operate like memory: each pure idea is interrupted and displaced by a cacophony of visual language and associated information. Design, illustration, Japanese comics and traditional painting all play a part in Thomas Scheibitz's consumerist reference. Through painting, he freeze-frames the supersonic blur of 21st century zeitgeist for intimate contemplation. Breaking down the information overload like a handcrafted digital matrix, Thomas Scheibitz maps out blueprints to navigate the modern world.

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