Arsis II, 2023

Christoph Schrein  

"I'm interested in exploring boundaries of painting and reducing the medium to its essentials. - Color, Light and Form. Trying to give observers a place where they can lose themselves and where subjective experience and perception completes the painting. It is always more a question than an answer.“ - Ch. Schrein 

Christoph Schrein is a German painter born in 1980 who lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. He explores the sublime in painting. In his paintings he creates a contemplative space that sucks the observer in an optical maelstrom. From influences of Minimal Art, New British Sculpture and also current trends in Generative Art, Christoph Schrein has developed an own imagery, which positions itself in contemporary abstract painting. The artwork seem like an abstract landscapes, a physical non-space that forms, due to the undulating colour streams and fluent movements a complex composition and three dimensional illusion. Over the years he was experimenting with a lot of new substrates for the painting like alu dibond or glass. The characteristics of glass for example– transparency and a plane surface – allows and also require the need to develop new techniques and designs. Applying colour on both sides of the glass leads to a perceptive challenge. Due to the spatial separation of both sides, light is refracted, so that the three-dimensional effect expands. Depending on the incidence angle of the light source and the observer's position, the spatial and colour perception varies. Thus the image turns into a light object. It seems to shine from its inside out, as if it starts to breathe. These works come into being from a reflexive-dialectical working process that consists in compressing colour, shape and spatial structures. One layer after another artistic gestures are superimposing themselves to get closer to the final image. However, the focus is not on the expressive process, but on the artificial image space, which speaks for itself and withholds the artist's former intervention. The artwork seems to have been developing by itself which also is its source of supply. Schreins paintings ask for a dialogue without giving any answers, they question the inner being of painting and create a space for subjective experience.