The Exhibition
Thomas Scheibitz’s artistic signature style is a genuinely iconographic oscillating between the two large themes of abstraction and figuration. He joins architectural references and facets of landscape prospects with elements from contemporary press coverage, advertising, and, not least of all, everyday culture. His dynamic images directly undercut any static order. In fact, they constantly seem to re-organize and to trigger comparison with our daily lives. He achieves this by challenging us with visual key stimuli.
For his debut at Pinakothek der Moderne, Thomas Scheibitz created a painterly and sculptural Gesamtkunstwerk in the exhibition galleries of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München. In three phases stretching from the foyer, to the hallway lined by vitrines, and on to the galleries it is devoted to the sculptures and drawings by Dresden artist Hermann Glöckner (1889–1987). His artistic colloquy evolves, connects, and eventually culminates in an ingenious homage. As early as his student days at Dresden art academy, Scheibitz treasured the artists’ artist Hermann Glöckner. However, the younger artist would never have considered placing his own work on equal par with that of the master of subtlety. Therefore, it is all the more impressive that Thomas Scheibitz functions, in his Munich exhibition, as both artist and curator. It attests to his intuition that he uses his own works as a catalyst for light-handedly preparing a stage for Glöckner’s refined noblesse and for making the older artist appear to us, once again, as surprisingly contemporary.
For nearly a decade now and with great expertise, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München has been collecting a superb group of works on paper by Hermann Glöckner, to which there is no equal in Germany. Undoubtebly, Glöckner is one of a small group of East German artists of Modernism and the inter-war lost generation of whom curators and museums took only notice after the fall of the wall. In its exhibition Hermann Glöckner. A Master of Modernism, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München in 2019 first introduced Glöckner’s singular Tafelwerk (a central body of work) by way of an avant-garde presentation to a wider public.
In our current exhibition, Thomas Scheibitz – A Tribute to Hermann Glöckner, the museum goes one step further. After having received a large donation of designs for architectural reliefs by Hermann Glöckner, Scheibitz has selected works not only from this recent acquisition. Facilitated by Glöckner loans from German museums and private collections, Scheibitz will moreover make visible, in a sculptural mis-en-scene designed by himself, Glöckner’s rank as a Modernist. This latest exhibition at the Munich museum offers an entirely new form of dialogical presentation that provides a sensual as well as an aesthetic kind of experience of Glöckner’s work.
Finally, our exhibition Thomas Scheibitz – A Tribute to Hermann Glöckner marks the end of a multi-annual research project on Hermann Glöckner’s sculpture by the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München that will culminate in a critical catalogue raisonné. Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung generously funded the scholarly research of Konstanze Rudert. As early as in the 1970s, Werner Schmidt (1930–2010) of Dresden’s Kupferstich-Kabinett together with Hermann Glöckner had started to put together a complete catalogue raisonné. Picking up where they left off, Michael Hering, director of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, now resumed their initiative. It culminated in a list of more than 600 sculptures. A selection will be available in a handsome representative catalog in the course of our exhibition.
Michael Hering
Director, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München
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