In painterly tradition, the shadow 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. The silhouette is among the oldest images known, cited as the very first act of picture-making, and 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.

The large-scale OSO (2017) weaves together disparate elements and visual planes, layered like stage sets, some in harmony, others in deliberate tension. The title stands for Ost-Süd-Ost (east-south-east), an intermediate point on a traditional compass largely superseded by modern navigation. It names a direction that is still precise but no longer in common use, suggesting that the frameworks by which we locate ourselves are never fixed but always historically contingent.

Helle Schatten (2026), which translates as bright shadows and gives the exhibition its title, embodies its premise directly. The large white teardrop at the painting’s centre reads simultaneously as a light source and a void, held by the same black contour line that defines and binds every other colour field.

Gebiet (2026) unfolds as a wide, frieze-like arrangement of borrowed forms across a bright blue ground: architectural fragments, a hand with scored lines that could double as a sculpture, a leaf, a house reduced to its barest outline. Each element arrives from a different register of visual experience—symbol, sign, body, building—without narrating or explaining the others.

Kirche (2023) takes as its starting point the Heddal Stave Church in Norway, which dates to the thirteenth century and is the largest surviving of its kind, characteristically distilling it into spare geometric form. The work is organised around tectonic relations—the way surfaces, spaces and formats negotiate with one another. The angular, roof-like forms of the base push outward in multiple directions. Above this, the volumes shear and lean against each other at oblique angles, making the logic of bearing and support the actual subject of the work. Brushily painted in acid yellow, it presents itself less as object than as a model of structural thinking made physical.

Other sculptures on view share this quality: spectral in character, they hover between object and sign, resisting easy reading as insistently as the works on canvas.

Scheibitz 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 and harder to place. The organising principle is tectonic, a structural system of forms and visual codes through which he constructs his own pictorial language.