Hubert Scheibl Committed To Memory

Last year, the four largest museums for contemporary art in China presented the much-noticed exhibition New Abstract Painting from Austria. In that exhibition, the contemplative gestic painting of Hubert Scheibl had an important status. After it had returned from China, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK) in Vienna staged the exhibition under the title China Retour.

We are pleased to be able to present to you in Salzburg a selection of the works of Hubert Scheibl that were shown in China and Vienna, plus a number of latest works under the title Committed to Memory.

Hubert Scheibl was born in Gmunden in 1952 and is one of the most important mid-generation Austrian artists. From 1976 to 1981, he studied under Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. Since the mid eighties when his work was acknowledged as an important reaction to then upcoming Neo-Expressionism, Scheibl's works are being shown in numerous international exhibitions.

The traceability of the gestic vestiges that are nevertheless absorbed by the unfathomable depth of the multi-layered paintings is characteristic for Scheibl's works. Continuously, the paint that is either mutilated or pressed to an enormous density by the spatula oscillates between total abstraction and the representation of landscape elements. But always, the paintings are marked by an almost object-like compactness of the material.

Scheibl's works lack the strictness of pure monochromy. Rather, Scheibl mostly starts his work by dealing with the nature of a single colour on a large canvas, and-over the course of the layered painting process-it becomes the actual subject of the painting. Nevertheless, the associative range of the depicted forms is too complex to let them be called art on art.

»Based on their space-dominating dimension, Scheibl's paintings are the epitome of physical force; they abstain from compositional complexity for the sake of undisguised directness which sometimes seems to draw the painting out of the wall«, as Dan Cameron, curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, sums up Hubert Scheibl's latest works in his catalogue contribution on the China exhibition, and he adds that in »some paintings [...], the majestic force of nature [is] the preferred vehicle for invoking the longing for permanence«.

Our exhibition is supplemented by the show Hubert Scheibl: Un-tiefen that was presented in the Museum der Moderne Salzburg Rupertinum. Here, a selection of drawings, graphic sheets, photographs, collages, and paintings over photographs is shown. They display a facet of the artist that has hitherto been somewhat forced onto the sidelines by his pictorial work.