Albrecht Schnider: Recent Paintings

Albrecht Schnider’s sixth solo exhibition with Galerie Thomas Schulte presents large-scale sprayed acrylic lacquer paintings alongside a selection of new works on raw canvas—contrasting textured and smooth surfaces and materializing shifts in the figure-ground relationship. In the interplay between images, what comes to the fore is the scope of constructive possibilities in Schnider’s work, emerging in parallel to the constancy of his distinctive visual language. Through processes of both intuition and analysis, Schnider constructs constellations of color fields that materialize images in a state of continual becoming. Forms and planes hover before our eyes, before the surface of the canvas, occupying a space entirely their own.

Schnider’s precise, abstract paintings objects take as their source the delicate explorations of shifting planes and geometric forms found in the artist’s drawings. Though the artist’s paintings demonstrate a restrained elegance, their source drawings, swiftly sketched at the end of each day in the studio, are products of a spontaneous, intuitive process. While many of these drawings simply remain exercises, never emerging from their sketchbook, others are singled out by the artist for further exploration. From these drawings, oppositions of line and surface, presence and absence, are distilled and translated into the larger, more rigid compositions of Schnider’s paintings. The contiguity and overlap of these planes of colour and negative space toy with our sense of perception, leading us to question whether we are gazing at shattered parts of a fragmented whole or the layers and voids of a three-dimensional pictorial window.