Thomas Scheibitz: A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events, an exhibition of new paintings, sculptures, drawing/collages, and prints by Thomas Scheibitz.  For his seventh solo show with the gallery, Scheibitz continues to draw from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and the influence of popular culture.  Filtering these sources through his own lens, he creates evocative and powerful pieces that blur the line between abstraction and figuration.

In a palette of murky grays, smoky purples, and pale blues, paired with sharp primaries, and vivid neons, the new paintings and sculptures in A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events are full of recognizable components—the numeral “1,” a backwards comma, a peering eye—interwoven with the artist’s own invented geometric assemblages. Culled from his archive of ephemera, which includes newspaper clippings, snapshots, magazine ads, plates from art books and historical texts, as well as other cultural artifacts, Scheibitz’s imagery is pared down to its barest formal properties, then recombined, layered, and expanded upon. For the first time, in this exhibition Scheibitz shows the viewer how he works with his cache of source material to build compositions: pairing seemingly incongruous found images in collages, he then adds drawings that riff on their formal properties, and hint at how all these components might be synthesized into a painting or sculpture.  These “worksheets,” and in fact the installation as a whole, serve as an investigation of composition across disparate media, as the artist shows us how each element of his practice relates to the others.  Breaking down his formal vocabulary into its constituent parts, in A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events, Scheibitz lets us into his creative cosmos, showing the viewer the connections within a constellation of works.

Organizational systems—maps, graphs, and charts—have long been of interest to Scheibitz, and have served as the starting point for many of his most iconic pieces.  In this new body of work, instead of using the map as a formal point of departure, from which to create an abstract composition, Scheibitz creates a map of his own process-- an overview that demonstrates how each piece fits into a cohesive whole. While existing autonomously, each image can also be connected to the other works in the show.  The collaged drawings are displayed on a table made by the artist that resembles both an independent sculpture and a pedestal, and each of these collages reference one of the sixteen small paintings installed on the walls of the main space.  In some of the collages the finished painting even appears as an element, complicating the notion that the works on paper are studies for the paintings—rather each is its own related but independent final product.