HUBERT SCHEIBL

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 Bildenden Künste in Vienna and started exhibiting internationally in the mid-eighties, when his work was acknowledged as a significant reaction to the then popular neo-expressionism. Scheibl is one of the most important and significant representatives of abstract-sensitive, gesture-intense painting amongst mid-generation Austrian artists, as well as being an assiduous draughtsman and photographer. Scheibl’s work both on paper and canvas is difficult to categorize. Sublime, fathomless, overwhelming and sensual, are some of the adjectives used to describe the practice. The lush, sensuous and nervous elements of the artist’s paper works reveal the speed and immediacy of their graphical gesture. The timeless aspect of Hubert Scheibl’s paintings derive from his remarkable skill at capturing 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 color unwittingly. Scheibl provides this sense of emotional freefall as the painting defines its own sense of time and place.