BERLIN.- Thomas Scheibitz (b. 1968 in Radeberg near Dresden) is one of few contemporary artists to work so diversely with variable elements and references derived equally from everyday life and the pool of art history. His dense, often brightly coloured paintings and schematic, often puristic sculptures can be understood as montages of a freely interpreted reality.

The works manifest themselves as complex caches of images or objects into which everyday visual culture has been inscribed and highly condensed by Scheibitz’s formal vocabulary. Pablo Picasso and Cubism’s influence on the artist is unmistakable. “Of all the great ‘isms’ of the 20th century”, explains Thomas Scheibitz, “Cubism is the most radical and has remained the most influential.”

An Open Encounter of Similarities
In this exhibition, the Museum Berggruen, dedicated to the art of Picasso and his time, spans an arc from classical Modernism to the art of the present. Each of the some 45 objects shows that even though Picasso and Scheibitz aren’t using the same motifs, they do share a very similar approach to art. Both artists understand their work as an open process that incessantly leads to new variations and developments building on previously found solutions. Nothing stays static. Both artists also adhere to the fundamental premises of painting and sculpture.

The exhibition is conceived as a direct juxtaposition of “Picasso” and “Scheibitz”, as an open parcours through the Museum Berggruen. The underlying differences in daily life that are also reflected in each work – of Paris as it used to be and Berlin today – could hardly be greater. All the more striking are the formal and content-related parallels as well as each artist’s struggle for credibility or validity – in the context of a fragile, unstable world (which existed in Picasso’s time as well).

A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.