Thomas Scheibitz

Thomas Scheibitz - Training as a toolmaker; painting studies

Thomas Scheibitz was born in Radeberg near Dresden in 1968. As the son of a stonemason, he learnt the basics of craftsmanship at an early age. Initially, he did not pursue a career in art, but learnt the more traditional trade of toolmaker from 1984 to 1987. He increasingly realised, however, that he wanted to follow a creative path and therefore began studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown of Dresden in 1991, graduating in 1996 – the final year of which he spent his final year as a master student of Ralf Kerbach at the Dresden School of Art. Scheibitz had already had his first exhibition whilst studying, a success that continued in the years that followed and also made him known in the USA, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Great Britain. Together with the German-British artist Tino Sehgal, he designed the German pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 - a presentation not without controversy among critics and the public, but one that represented an important milestone in Thomas Scheibitz's career.

Provocations and irritations deconstruct the world

Thomas Scheibitz understands each image as a unique phenomenon, as an event that cannot be put into words and described or retold. In fact, in the artist's opinion, a picture that can be grasped with words of retelling is a lost picture. The dynamic, highly individual encounter between viewer and work loses its value if it can be captured and reported. This is why Scheibitz attempts to go beyond the dimension of the tangible with his painting - and does so with great success at a time when painting is considered to be an outdated art. To achieve his goal, he has acquired an impressively comprehensive vocabulary of forms with which he repeatedly transcends the framework of his pictures. The ideas, objects and motifs that stand at the beginning of a work increasingly lose their form and contour in the artist's adaptation and realisation, fading into a distant suggestion that has long since taken on a different form in the present: as a puzzle piece of a world, the established order of which Thomas Scheibitz questions in a provocative and irritating way. 

The relationship between subject and reality as a central theme

Thomas Scheibitz does not limit himself to painting, but devotes himself equally to sculpture as his chosen means of artistic expression. He finds inspiration and motifs for his work everywhere: in the landscape, in architecture, in media and pop culture. The construction of reality and its relationship to the subject is a central theme of Scheibitz's works. The complex visual and symbolic language that Scheibitz develops and uses is not intended to be deciphered by the viewer. As a work of art, it stands for itself.

Thomas Scheibitz lives and works today mainly in Berlin.