Hubert Scheibl

Hubert Scheibl is one of those painters in Austria who paved the way for a new consciousness of painting at the beginning of the 1980s. What was summarised in Germany as "Junge Wilde" and in Italy as "Transavantguardia" was called "New Painting" in Austria. From the beginning, Scheibl went the way of abstraction - similar to Hubert Damisch, Herbert Brandl or Otto Zitko - and not the way of the representational, like Hubert Schmalix, Siegfried Anzinger or Alois Mosbacher. His development within abstract painting was initially supported by the gestural and the materiality of the colour substance. Only slowly did the colour masses recede and Scheibl arrived at a completely free and direct conception of painting. Vast spaces and infinite spheres open up in his often very large paintings. These are not abstractions of nature - in other words, abstracted representations. Rather, his development can be seen in reverse. From the initially violently flung masses of paint, Scheibl comes to apparent concretisations at the beginning of the 1990s, while the application of paint becomes thinner, sometimes even glazing. As a viewer, one is inclined to recognise something familiar in the paintings, but is soon disillusioned and led on into more distant dimensions of the painterly cosmos. One may be reminded of the vastness of space or of interstellar dynamics, also of oceanic depths and landscape expanses, but this is too obvious an interpretation. Scheibl's painting is the result of an eminently creative process. He creates completely new spaces and spheres that only exist within painting - no representation in the classical sense.

It is the conflict between exogenous (external) and endogenous (internal) images that seems to be fundamental here. The inner images that each of us permanently carries within us and that are also hardly definable, these are what the artist tries to liberate and make visible. Of course, the outer visualities are always effective like disturbing corrective measures. Scheibl keeps this field of tension in balance in his painting. A great colourist and creator of new worlds stands before us here with his works. They are not a reflection of an existing reality, but quite decidedly new levels of reality. Hubert Scheibl expands the visible world through his pictures and opens up diverse dimensions of perception to the audience.

Günther Holler-Schuster