Thomas Scheibtz draws equally from everyday life and from art history, distilling both into dense, vividly coloured paintings and elusive sculptures: repositories of accumulated imagery, layered and compressed until the familiar becomes something stranger. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Bright Shadows, a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Scheibitz at the London gallery, spanning from 2017 to the present. The show’s title serves not as a contradiction but as an artistic proposition that places at its centre an easily overlooked means of representation: the shadow. In painterly tradition, it is composed of all other colours rather than black, a play between absence and presence; for Scheibitz, “the shadow is a realm, like a landscape.” In his paintings, this is carried by the contour that emerges as a narrow silhouette, defining the boundary between one colour field and the next. In a world saturated with pictures, the unilluminated portion of things may be the more instructive starting point—not for reading images directly, but for analysing the logic by which they come to mean anything at all.

About Thomas Scheibitz