We are pleased to present a selection of the works of Hubert Scheibl for the first time in Korea at Wooson Gallery. Hubert Scheibl is one of the most important painters of his generation in Austria. He begun his career as a significant representative of an abstract-sensitive, gesture-intense painting amongst mid-generation Austrian artists. However, his creative way led him towards a meditative and introverted painting which reflects universal intellectual questioning of time and being as personal experience as well as cultural and historical context. He developed a very complex hidden narrative in which the most personal and emotional elements are related to certain cultural - and subcul¬tural - thematics and iconographics.
Representative of contemporary Austrian painting, Hubert Scheibl is part of a generation that explores new possibilities of a neo-expressionist painting as well as revisits the great tradition of meditative and spiritual abstraction. Typically enough he creates a certain eclectic painterly vocabular in which divers visual language systems are mixing together. As many artists of his generation, also Hubert Scheibl is working with photography and video. When he paints or draws, grabs the surface of the cloth or paper as a movie screen. In a multi-referencial, simultaneously intellectual and sensual engagement for a new, authentic, contemporary narrative, his drawing and painting are indicative of the immediacy of its gesture, partly inherited from the “drippings” of Jackson Pollock.
His works are collected by numerous private collectors and public institutions all around the world including the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Austria), Al¬bertina Wien (Austria), Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (Austria), Centre Pompidou, Paris (France), Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole (France), Sammlung Deutsche Bank Frankfurt (Germany), E.ON Energie AG Düsseldorf (Germany), Ashdod Museum (Israel), Shanghai Art Museum (China), National Museum Beijing (China) etc.
His recent painting reflects an almost romantic and pantheistic vision of universe through the picturesque structure which evokes formations of representation of landscape as well, totally abstract, none representational, materialistic handling of the paint material. But always, the paintings are marked by an almost object-like compactness of the mate¬rial. Everything in the current works by Hubert Scheibl revolves around the interaction between human beings and nature. Nature is a tremendous, elementary force and at the same time the source of life. Natural catastrophes reveal the strength of nature and the limitations of humans. Scheibl deals with nature’s ambivalence and our existence within it in paintings and paper works.
Wooson Gallery presents over 30 works selected recent paintings and drawings of super-imposed layers of colour, with visible traces left by the scratching of the palette knife. Hu¬bert Scheibl has been regularly creating pictures dominated by drawing for several years now. The lower layers of painted colour are usually covered by a white layer and then revealed again through scratches. These monumental works are related with the purist, seismographic drawings on paper which Hubert Scheibl has been creating continuously since the late 1980s. In the large format the artist can positively inscribe himself bodily by tracing generous rhythmical gestures across the canvas. What one sees here are unique creations, the most direct marks left by an artist’s action.
The timeless aspect of Hubert Scheibl’s paintings derive from his remarkable skill at cap-turing the inner light behind the picture plane which creates a sense of deep space; it is here that the viewer is drawn, into a matrix of gesture and colour unwittingly. Scheibl provides this sense of emotional freefall as the painting defines its own sense of time and place. The works on paper do the same, in a subtle and transparent way.
Hubert Scheibl was born in 1952 in Gmunden (Austria) and currently lives in Vienna. From 1976 to 1981 he studied under Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer at the Akademie der Bil-denden Künste in Vienna. He started exhibiting internationally in the mid-eighties, when his work begun to get large acknowledgement. He has had countless solo shows and group shows in Europe and the United States during the last two decades. Recent major solo exhibitions include: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (1999), Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2006), Rocca Sforzesca di Dozza, Bologna (2008), Stadtgalerie im Stadmuseum, Deggendorf (2009), Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig (2012).
Press release courtesy Wooson Gallery.