BERLIN.- Thomas Scheibitz is the fourth artist to develop a site-specific work for the twenty-metre-high Kesselhaus at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art. Once a year, an artist is invited to realise a single work for this enormous space. After Roman Signer with his nose-diving airplane Kitfox Experimental, David Claerbout with his thousand-year real-time projection Olympia, and Haegue Yang with her installation Silo of Silence – Clicked Core hanging in the middle of the space, Thomas Scheibitz is now the first artist to respond to the spatial situation with a free-standing work.

Sculpture and painting have an equally important place in Thomas Scheibitz’s artistic practice. The basis for his work is his extensive collection of two- and three-dimensional things: handwritten notes, countless reference illustrations from art history, newspaper clippings, illustrated books on a variety of topics, sketches, his own photographs, and strange objects. The artist collects, filters, sorts, and archives all these things, which then flow into the creative process of his works through various transformations. Over the years, Scheibitz has developed a vocabulary that characterises his entire oeuvre and is always situated between autonomous placements and fleeting references to the real world.

Plateau mit Halbfigur is Thomas Scheibitz’s largest sculpture to date. The development of this multi-part work—an intensive process of sculpting and determining the dimensions for the Kesselhaus—took around one and a half years. The artist formulated the guidelines as follows: “Scale without being overwhelming, material without effect, colour conceived with form. Everything is marked by the conditions of rapid construction, which also show the openness of the temporary.” And finally: “The goal remains to lend a form to ideas.”

The title Plateau mit Halbfigur primarily refers to a plinth-like structure that creates an autonomous place in the room for the work. At the same time, it points to the fundamentally fragmentary and emphasises the cut-out quality, which can be continually expanded and reconceived. On the red painted plateau, the artist has arranged seven sculptural elements, or—as he calls them—prototypes: building, letter, face, drop, gate, bridge, and boot. These individual elements form a condensed, complex whole and direct the viewers’ attention—for instance, to surface and body, to different surface treatments, or to constantly changing spatial perspectives.

The exhibition was curated by Andreas Fiedler.

A two-part exhibition catalogue will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König in Cologne.

Thomas Scheibitz (b. 1968) lives and works in Berlin. His works are regularly shown in exhibitions around the world, including Masterplan\kino (Kunstmuseum Bonn and Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, 2018), Inherent Structure (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA, 2018), Excitement: Exhibition by Rudi Fuchs (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2016), Picasso in Contemporary Art (Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, 2015), Radiopictures (Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2014), Studio Imaginaire (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2014), and ONE-Time Pad (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, 2013 and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 2012).