Thomas Scheibitz
One-Time Pad
September 29, 2012–January 13, 2013
MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst
Frankfurt am Main
Domstraße 10
60311 Frankfurt am Main
The œuvre of Thomas Scheibitz (born 1968) is as extensive as it is multi-faceted. The MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main is staging the first comprehensive exhibition of his work to take place in Germany. In the early nineties, Scheibitz developed a new form of conceptual painting and sculpture, taking the history of modern art and visual manifestations of the present as a basis for exploring the boundaries of figuration and generating new forms of abstraction.
A significant proportion of the approximately two hundred works in the exhibition at the MMK will be on view for the first time. One gallery in the exhibition has moreover been curated by Thomas Scheibitz with works from the MMK Collection. Occupying the museum’s central hall as well as its entire upper floor, the show will concentrate primarily on his paintings, works on paper, drawings and sculptures, as well as on the secondary material Scheibitz has amassed over the years. The artist archives reproductions of images from fashion, music and architecture magazines, record covers, photographs and sketches of his own, objects from the do-it-yourself store, the toyshop, art-historical illustrations, and much else besides, and draws from them as a basis for a pictorial language on the boundary between figuration and abstraction. These sources serve the artist as links to reality to which he refers in his works, while at the same time strongly alienating them. His paintings and sculptures maintain a balance between perception and memory—of the artist and the viewer alike.
Against the background of his archive, Scheibitz turns visual impressions into a new semiotics ranging between contemporaneity and timelessness. A chief focus of the exhibition is the human figure, a motif which has preoccupied the artist for many years. Within this context, he does not draw from the humanist concept of the body, but seeks a new and contemporary symbolic and formulaic approach in accordance with the human being of the modern world.
The exhibition title One-Time Pad is the name given to a type of encryption used for secret messages which is considered to be impossible to crack. In using this term, Scheibitz is alluding to the coding process that he employs in his artistic work. In his paintings and sculptures he investigates, in a multistage process, the borderline between reality and invention, taking familiar phenomena and transposing them into his own personal pictorial idiom.
Catalogue
To accompany the exhibition there is a catalogue designed by Thomas Scheibitz, with a foreword by Susanne Gaensheimer, texts by Beate Söntgen and Mark von Schlegell, and a conversation between Thomas Scheibitz und Isabelle Graw.
