Hubert Scheibl

Overview

Photo @ pixelstorm Vienna

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"The good artist is an ally of chance."

Hubert Scheibl, whose artistic cosmos always revolves around evolution, the origin of the world, nature and its forms, welcomes the coincidence that takes place during painting: With sole effort and intention, this kind of painting would not succeed.

In contrast to his scratched paintings, which allow a glimpse under the layers and thus reveal them, the works with silver spray conceal the image; and yet this concealment encourages one to suspect what is underneath and to let one's own interpretation play.
The time of creation of his painting is determined by the material, for the surface, the oil paint, must be soft in order to form it, it is alive and can only be controlled by this. The advancing drying process dictates the timing, a welcome time pressure that does not allow the artist to rest. Some paintings are often reworked when the bottom layer is completely dry. Be it that the loop in the series Ones is placed on the picture's square, be it that in the latest series End of Flags a wide squeegee lays the paint over the canvas like a delicate curtain, or in the fact that Scheibl covers his pictures with silver emulsion to a certain extent.

But it is also the present that Hubert Scheibl lets speak in his works. The so-called Cage Paintings were also created during the Corona period, which was demanding for everyone. Rather kept in muted colours, the oscillating layers of colour are broken up by vertical incisions. Cage - cage - thus also immediately reveals the reference to bars. There is also the personal aspect in this series: Corona has made travelling, as Scheibl loves and knows it, almost impossible, it has locked him up, put him behind bars.

Works

Biography

Photo © Didi Sattmann

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Hubert Scheibl lives and works in Vienna

born 1952 in Gmunden, Upper Austria

Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1976 to 1981 under Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer. In the 1980s he was a member of the Neue Wilden group. He is one of the most important Austrian representatives of abstract painting.

International exhibitions such as the Bienal de São Paulo in 1985 or the Biennale di Venezia in 1988, made him known to a wide audience.

His works from collections or on loan are also often shown in museums, for example in 2023 at the Lower Belvedere in Vienna or at the Kunsthaus Zurich, and in 2021 in a solo exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna.

HUBERT SCHEIBL. PAINTERLY TRACES IN SPACE

Trace and space combine in Hubert Scheibl's pictorial world in a complex and manifold way. In his artistic beginnings in the 1980s, Scheibl was one of the leading proponents of neo-expressionist painting based on personal handwriting. Traces of the self floated on the picture surface, whether through explosive discharges of the brush or by means of expansive notations with the pen; a physical inscription.

In the recent series of paintings Ones, Scheibl condenses the gesture into a sign-like looping structure that floats in the spherical pictorial space. Index and icon combine with each other. The abstract gesture becomes a figure, a painterly object. In Abstract Expressionism, Franz Kline, for example, and also the Austrian informal painter Markus Prachensky force the gesture as a direct setting on the picture ground: Kline's black bar-like constructions on a white ground as well as Prachensky's Rouge sur noir pictures. Similar to a flash of lightning, the gestural settings illuminate the picture surface as a sublime powerful abstract figure with which we are directly confronted. Scheibl's Ones looping formations are more like jellyfish-like organisms, floating gently and elegantly in the watery atmospheric pictorial space. Even though the artist does not intend to make any explicit reference to nature in the sense of depicting reality, it is always present. Scheibl rejects any purist-dogmatic attitude of abstract art. We are nature and part of evolution. The artist shows this on a large as well as a small scale - galactic stellar spaces, deep-sea zones in twilight, microcosmic structures, ultrasound images and virological cellularity. Scheibl contrasts the guided gestural brushstroke with the pouring of paint, which is more oriented towards chance, as especially in the Nicotine on Silverscreen series. The shimmering silver paint partially seals the underlying spherical-colouristic pictorial spaces, like dense clouds with whirlwind inclusions, which astronauts as well as we perceive via satellite images looking down on our earth. Scheibl's painting is a powerful processual cosmos, a Milky Way of images. In part, his groups of pictures and blocks of works are clearly distinguishable from one another, and have different stylistic-formal qualities: Graphic - painterly, spherical grounds - agitated expressionist pictorial zones, poured colour varnishes - gestural brushstroke formations. Often these elements intertwine in one and the same picture. Brittle rugged hybrids emerge, transitional works that lead to other pictorial creations. In the white-dominated paintings, graphic and painterly means mix, the two-dimensional and the spatial, when the artist covers a spherical coloured picture surface with white paint and then subsequently wounds it with graphic strokes and strokes. From the wounds of the white skin gapes the colouristic splendour of the painterly flesh.

Due to the pandemic situation, Scheibl's travelling was extremely restricted. Enclosure is the theme of the new Cage paintings. They are mostly dark and gloomy, with vertical line structures suggesting cage-like forms. Scheibl refers here to Francis Bacon's existentialist obscure portrait paintings of the Velazquez popes, whose cries are swallowed up by the powerful darkness of the painting.
Scheibl needs pure drawing, or gouache on paper, as a counterbalance to the psychophysically immensely demanding acts of painting. Fine nerve networks, informal signs and microscopic structures interweave on the sheet.

(Florian Steininger)

Exhibitions