David Schnell (Leipzig, Germany, b. 1971) Visit the Artist's Site
Oil on canvas, 2010
94 1/2 x 181 1/16 inches
David Schnell was born and raised in Bergische Gladbach, near medieval city of Cologne, and moved to Leipzig in 1995 to study at the city’s Academy of Visual Arts. The relatively unspoiled, rural countryside surrounding the town of his youth stood in stark contrast to the brutalizing effects of man-made terrain in urban East Germany and Schnell became intrigued not only by this dramatic distinction but also by landscape theory, its long history of representation in art, and man’s active working and reworking of nature. Schnell studied graphic design for two years at the academy before turning his talents to painting. As his painting style evolved, Schnell became closely associated with distinct group of German artists interested in depicting fantasy environments, disruption of space, and the ambitious use of color and perspective, techniques most closely associated with Leipzig artist, Neo Rauch.
Moving away from Rauch’s historicized visions, Schnell began to employ the pictorial elements of a traditional landscape – forest, foliage, sky, roadways, architecture, a recognizable horizon line, and often, an emphatic central vanishing point – not as the embodiment of his work but instead, as a fundamental framework for the expression of his personal dialectic. “First-time viewers might be under the impression that they are looking at landscape paintings, but in reality they are witnessing Schnell’s obsessive treatment of space – something he frequently intensifies by painting in large formats that seem to engulf the viewer.”
Schnell has continued to exploit the possibilities found in formal landscape through his mastery of planar regression and spatial tension. By arranging exaggeratedly long planks of wood, blades of grass, broken shards of light, etc., in a manner that drives the viewer’s gaze into the depth of the picture, David Schnell maximizes the effects of linear perspective and the vanishing point illusion. His painterly counterpoints in color, line, and brushwork often result in such heightened dynamism that “movement is no longer restricted to the picture plane; it has spilled over the edges and into the horizon of the viewer’s own expectations and experiences.”
In Moment (2010), Schnell presents his typical synergy of visual extremes – order and chaos, nature and artifice, physical matter and kinetic energy – shattering the comfort of real time in an impossible explosive instant. His rigid code of linear perspective is imposed through soaring vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines that converge to form an unsettling vanishing point just above the center of the composition's lower edge. His dominant citrus palette bursts with springtime vigor while washes and drips of charcoal, gray and purple suggest an ominous industrial presence. Schnell's Moment of spatial and temporal anarchy is further achieved by random blasts of vegetation and short vertical slashes that interrupt his elongated, free-flowing brush strokes. The overall effect is that of being sucked headlong into a world of “stupefying speed and energy.”
David Schnell lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. He is represented by Galerie Eigen, Leipzig and Berlin.
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