Thomas Scheibitz's Abacus Exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Explores Dialectics and Ambiguity

German painter Thomas Scheibitz presented his exhibition 'Abacus' at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York from October 28 to December 19, 2020. The show featured deliberately disparate canvases that blend figurative and abstract elements, with each painting maintaining its own singularity rather than pursuing consistency. Works like 'Pile' (2020) demonstrate architectural dispositions with linear squared elements and volumetric spaces, evoking Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten blocks from 1837 that were designed to stimulate spatial thinking through play. 'Key' and the hanging sculpture 'Magnet' (both 2020) reveal Scheibitz's method of permutating abstract universal elements that function as signs, creating rich figure-ground ambiguities. 'Key' specifically references Juan Gris through its flattened quasi-cubist picture plane. The painting 'Speicher 1072' initially presents simple clarity with figural elements in planar space, but its title references Camp Memory, site of the 2014 Islamic State massacre of Shias and non-Muslims in Tirkrit, Iraq. This connection introduces unsettling cultural associations while maintaining indeterminacy of meaning. Scheibitz's practice involves reworking compositional givens to create dynamic intensities through transfigured compositions that resist facile interpretation. The exhibition was located at 521 West 21st Street between 10th and 11th avenues in New York City.