Bright Shadows

Bright Shadows is a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Thomas Scheibitz at the London gallery, spanning from 2017 to the present. The show's title serves not as a contradiction but as an artistic proposition that places at its centre an easily overlooked means of representation: the shadow. In painterly tradition, the shadow is composed of all other colours rather than black, a play between absence and presence; for Scheibitz, "the shadow is a realm, like a landscape." In his paintings, this is carried by the contour that emerges as a narrow silhouette, defining the boundary between one colour field and the next. The silhouette is among the oldest images known, cited as the very first act of picture-making, and in a world saturated with pictures, the unilluminated portion of things may be the more instructive starting point—not for reading images directly, but for analysing the logic by which they come to mean anything at all. The exhibition features large-scale paintings and sculptures that draw equally from everyday life and art history, distilling both into dense, vividly coloured paintings and elusive sculptures: repositories of accumulated imagery, layered and compressed until the familiar becomes something stranger and harder to place. The organising principle is tectonic, a structural system of forms and visual codes through which Scheibitz constructs his own pictorial language.