Hubert Schmalix

Schmalix's work of the early 1980s belongs to the international movement of the Neue Wilde, later the painting process becomes more constructively concentrated. The artist understands the picture surface as an arrangement of colour surfaces between figuration and abstraction. Graceful figures become formal islands surrounded by generous, monochrome zones. Schmalix's departure from the "new wild painting" opens up new possibilities for him to expand his pictorial syntax, to concentrate his vocabulary and to play it out in ever new "picture texts".

This goes hand in hand with a planned application of paint and a clearly thought-out pictorial structure that is as aware of the possibilities of decoration as it is of subtle mannerisms and plays with the appeal of a seemingly mechanical way of doing things as well as with its subtle breaking through.

From the very beginning, the nude took on a central role in the painter's pictorial world, erotic, often even lascivious and flirting with pornography. However, Schmalix undermines the sensual, inviting dimension by breaking it with his flat painting and relativising the illusionary appearance of the object. The protagonists become painterly signs, stencils that run serially through the artist's pictures - separated or as a kind of module in the larger picture group, paired with floral, ornamental or landscape elements.

(Florian Steininger)