Thomas Scheibitz
Alphabet T³ (2020)
The attempt to create an alphabet of visual art is thoroughly characteristic of the painter and sculptor Thomas Scheibitz. Not only do basic geometric shapes define the visual grammar of his pictures, his motifs also avail themselves of the linguistic repertoire of information encoding and decoding. In this sense, abstraction in Scheibitz’s art is merely another name for the highest possible degree of generality. His catalogue of forms is drawn from figures, lines, grids, and typographies that, invariably, seem like fragments of a language of painting that frames the communicative function of signs as images: as a graphic vocabulary. This thoroughly painterly engagement with signs is evident in Scheibitz’s “Alphabet T¹–T³,” produced exclusively for “Texte zur Kunst.” The ditone prints on photographic paper are available in three different color variants and treat writing – and more particularly, the letter “T” – as image. Isolated from the rest of the alphabet, which Scheibitz has, overthe course of three years, also painted, the individual letter’s graphic form breaks free of its context. At the same time, this “T” takes us to the very heart of the work that has been done at “Texte zur Kunst” over the past 30 years: no “T” without “K,” and vice versa.