TOR (Primary Title)
David Schnell, born 1971 German (Artist)
I deal with the portrayal of space. —David Schnell
Schnell is identified with a group of West German painters who chose, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to study at the Academy of Art in Leipzig, a thenimpoverished industrial town in former East Germany. The academy had been somewhat insulated from the experimental practices of contemporary artists like the West German Joseph Beuys. Still embracing traditional manual skills, artists in Leipzig drew from nude models, rendered complex spatial perspectives, and learned formal compositional analysis. In Tor, Schnell employs his virtuoso knowledge of “correct” perspective to depict a world of dynamic vantage points and shifting planes. The melancholic landscape of Leipzig can be glimpsed through the door of an interior and appears both actual and virtual, solid and dissolving, evoking the city’s post–Cold War transformation in a unified, contemporary Germany.
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