David Schnell, Leipzig: album. Painting and Graphics

Opening: Monday, March 26, 2018, 7:00 PM, in the presence of the artist
In collaboration with Galerie Eigen + Art.
Artist talk: Thursday, March 29, 2018, 7:00 PM, Goethe-Gallery. Moderation in English: Prof. Harald Kraemer

On the occasion of Art Basel Hong Kong, the Goethe-Institut will be presenting selected new works by David Schnell, with a focus on graphics.

David Schnell, attributed to the German New Leipzig School, creates landscape paintings that demonstrate mastery of both traditional painting and digital techniques. In contrast to his color-intensive paintings, his digital-graphic works are mainly in greyscale. His painting seems to carry out a weighing between imitating construed naturalness, on the one hand, and the rational and rule-like composition of pixel-like abstraction, on the other. The paintings’ development follows a continual process of consolidation and abstraction by turning reality into a picture that allows its actual origin to be almost completely forgotten. Bit by bit, Schnell plumps the depths of the visual knowledge that has accumulated in his memory in order to condense a variety of different experiences of space into a single picture. His etchings were also for the most part created after his paintings, often with the same motifs and compositions, but with a completely different effect. With the print, there is no possibility to work with color effects, whereby this is impressively compensated for in the aquatint etchings through the most delicate structures and the finest details.

(Extracts taken from the texts Up in the air by Eva Muller-Remmert, published in the catalogue: David Schnell. Window(s), Wienand Verlag, Cologne 2017, vert by Frédéric Bußmann and Controlled Chaos by Ute Stuffer, published in the catalogue: Stunde, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfldern 2010.)

© David Schnell David Schnell (born in Bergisch Gladbach in 1971) is one of the most known painters of his generation. He studied painting in the class of professor Arno Rink at the Hochschule fur Grafk und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) in Leipzig. Since then he is living and working in Leipzig. David Schnell paints landscapes. Despite all the serenity and balance of its composition, often produced by a strong one-point perspective, David Schnell’s painting creates the feeling of being drawn into the picture. The viewers stand as if on a ramp in front of Schnell’s paintings, imaginarily just about to plunge into the picture. His paintings open up like a window onto a dynamized pictorial space.