The river and its source

6 February - 10 April 2011
 

The Maramotti Collection, in Reggio Emilia, announces an exhibition of paintings and a sculpture by Thomas Scheibitz, one of the most important contemporary German artists (in 2005 he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale).

In the compositional structure of Scheibitz's works, the variety of iconic and tectonic elements constitute, or allude to, abstract, para-geometrical translations of figures and signs lifted from the very public repertory of images offered by our historical visual culture and by the media– newspapers, magazines, advertising, cinema.

In the artists’ pictorial construction, these elements are, however, always presented with an enhanced perspective vision, which is a constant feature of his evolving formal language.

His sculptures follow an analogous process: Scheibitz transposes the figures he has collected from the systematic exploration of the collective imaginary, and hermetically turns them into playful plastic forms. Appropriation for him always implies re-invention.

This is why he has regularly mixed in his exhibitions works on canvas and tridimensional works. They coexist in his daily practice.

For the Maramotti Collection, Scheibitz’s project consists of three large paintings and one sculpture, but neither the sculpture is a tridimensional enlargement of the painting’s imagery, nor the paintings constitute bidimensional repetitions of the shapes in the sculpture.
While the latter may appear as a monumental version of a hieroglyph quoted from an unknown language, the three paintings are instead performing an abstract play which evokes and transforms into myth the sets and other plastic elements of Bauhaus and Suprematist theatre.

An artist's book accompanies the exhibition. It includes a selection of images and drawings chosen by Scheibitz from the iconographic archive upon which most of his work is founded. Each chapter of the book focuses on one of the works in the show, providing a view into the ideas and the process characterizing the artist’s creations. The book, published by Gli Ori, also includes a critical essay by Mario Diacono, both in Italian and in English.


Press-clipping selection

S. Parmiggiani, L'atlante della memoria, in "Il Giornale dell'Arte", n. 307, Mar. 2011