Hubert Scheibl – The End of Flags
Hubert Scheibl is one of the most important contemporary Austrian painters. His oil paintings and drawings are always non-representational, renouncing subject matter in favour of emotions, the artist’s own, as well as those of his spectators.
His art is defined by dichotomies and antinomies. Certain works reveal an infinite variety of colour in the cracks in the uppermost, bright monochrome layer of paint. Others depend on the contrast within spaces of light, reminiscent of the Old Masters, countered by grand painterly gestures, executed in one controlled movement. Others in turn open new vistas on imaginary landscapes of colour and light, behind mist-like veils of colour. All of Hubert Scheibl’s paintings, however, seem suffused by an inner radiance.
Hubert Scheibl is one of the most important contemporary Austrian painters. His oil paintings and drawings are always non-representational, renouncing subject matter in favour of emotions—the artist’s own as well as those of his spectators.
The artist likes to give his paintings expressive titles, often borrowed from the cinema, intentionally evoking, as a subtext, a variety of associations in the viewer. They are called Ones, Badland, Das ist eine sehr schöne Zeichnung, Dave…(That’s a very nice drawing, Dave), or The End of Flags. Yet the attempt to discover a theme usually comes to naught, or rather leads back to painting itself, to colour and the movement generated by the layers of paint.
The artist uses a variety of different painting tools, such as brush, spatula or fountain blade, to create paintings that are poignantly balanced between intuition and careful consideration, between an impulsive painterly directness and a reflective distance. Action sits alongside reaction, space alongside surface, chaos alongside structure.
Hubert Scheibl’s art is defined by dichotomies and antinomies. Certain works reveal an infinite variety of colour in the cracks of the uppermost, bright monochrome layer of paint. Others depend on the contrast within spaces of light, reminiscent of the Old Masters, countered by grand painterly gestures executed in one controlled movement. Others in turn open new vistas onto imaginary landscapes of colour and light behind mist-like veils of colour. All of Hubert Scheibl’s paintings, however, seem suffused by an inner radiance.
Hubert Scheibl (born 1952 in Gmunden, Austria) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under the tutorship of Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer. In 1988 he participated in the Venice Biennale. Since then, his works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions all over the world, most recently at the Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig, the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, the Kunsthalle Vienna, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.
His works are held in many important collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami, the Albertina in Vienna, and the Collection of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.
Hubert Scheibl lives and works in Vienna.
