The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to present the solo exhibition of German artist Thomas Scheibitz. This will be his first exhibition to concentrate particularly on sculpture and drawing.

Scheibitz has been widely recognized for his innovative paintings, which have been presented in major exhibitions reviewing the status of contemporary painting such as Examining Pictures, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000), Painting on the Edge of the World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000), Painting Pictures, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. His artistic practice, however, awards equal importance to drawing and sculpture.

Scheibitz paints the surfaces of his sculptures, and his drawings and paintings are based on sculptural forms. The structures he paints, draws and builds occupy the border between abstraction and figuration, exploring a dynamic range of form, texture and colors. The exhibition at the Centre d’Art Contemporain will present around 28 sculptures and a series of works on paper, including 50 drawings, all of which have been specifically conceived for this context. Juxtaposed sculptural elements of various scales will activate the exhibition space in its three dimensions: suspended from the ceiling, displayed on the floor and hung on the walls.

Their shapes draw from various influences extending from El Greco’s paintings to Manga cartoons and Berlin’s constructivist architecture. The artist has been compiling a visual dictionary for over a decade, and it includes motifs from art history, architecture, design and film. However these images act only as a rough framework from which to understand his work, since the artist repeatedly reworks, reduces and distils them until barely a hint of the original reference persists. A high degree of fragmentation and accumulation of geometries and perspectives are always at play in the artist’s works, so that one could describe it as being constructed from the constant compression of meanings.

Thomas Scheibitz, born in Radeberg in 1968, lives and works in Berlin. He has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1999), Kunstmuseum of Winterthur (2001), Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig (2002) and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002). He has formed part of group shows such as Examining Pictures, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000), Painting on the Edge of the World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000), Painting Pictures, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2003), Recent German Painting, Kunstmuseum Frankfurt, (2003), and the Venice Biennial (2003).