Thomas Scheibitz: Missing Link in Delphi: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is delighted to present, Missing Link in Delphi, an exhibition of new painting, sculpture and works on paper by Thomas Scheibitz.  For his sixth solo presentation with the gallery, Scheibitz creates dynamic and precise works of layered form and color in two and three dimensions that continue his ongoing exploration of the boundaries between abstraction and figuration.  While centrally concerned with principles of classification and systems of order, Scheibitz’s work resists traditional categorization itself, instead simultaneously collapsing and expanding conventional definitions and opening up new sculptural and painterly territory.

In the contrasting layers of bold and murky colors that slice his canvases, and the pleated folds of his sculptures, Scheibitz references images drawn from our collective visual culture and distilled down to their most elemental formal properties.  Through these allusions, Scheibitz explores notions of perception and challenges our facilities and limitations in deciphering given information and the wider world around us. Recognition does come in flashes—arrows, curtains, screens, and letters appear in the works—but what these recognizable elements signify is intentionally open and unclear.   The fleeting glimpses of meaning disappear almost as soon as they arrive, to be replaced with a more literal and authentic experience of visual form as the delicate intersection of texture, shape and color.  This slippage between symbol and significance is fertile ground for Scheibitz and this generative uncertainty exists in each work, provoking and stimulating the viewer. 

Formal concerns are equally important in dictating meaning, and color plays an especially important role as a material.  Scheibitz’s use of color is substantive; his layers of hues create planes of space and depths of field in his paintings in a manner that is both art-historically traditional and utterly new.   This is true of his sculpture as well—Scheibitz deliberately emphasizes the parity between his sculpture and painting, and considers them partners in his practice, seeing each medium as both an extension and representation of the other.