Sybille Pattscheck

(* 1958 Wesel)
in Cologne (Pulheim)

1980-86 Academy of Fine Arts Münster, painting studies with Ulrich Erben (master student)

1986 Studio scholarship of the city of Münster

1987 Promotion Prize of the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe

1988 Work scholarship of the State of NRW in Ringenberg

2018 Art Prize of the Artists, Great Art Exhibition Düsseldorf

Solo exhibitions / selection

2018 Strelow Gallery, Düsseldorf, Images of Colour

2014 Gallery Katwijk, Amsterdam (with Pieter Oebels)

2012 Galerie van den Berge, Goes, NL, (with H. v 't Hoog, and F. Soethout)

2007 vis á vis, Art from NRW, Kunsthaus NRW, former Kornelimünster Imperial Abbey

Kunstraumno 10, Mönchengladbach

Painted Moments, Kunstverein Heinsberg

Exhibition participation/ selection

2020 Abstraction, Gallery Strelow, Reasons To Be Cheerful, Gallery van den Berge, NL,

2019 35th survey exhibition of the West German Artists' Association, Osthaus-Museum Hagen

2017 An sich, Kunstverein Heinsberg, (K), painting black, (K), Foundation for Conceptual Art, Soest

2016 Great Art Exhibition Düsseldorf (K)

2013 33rd General Exhibition of the West German Artists' Association, Museum Bochum (K);

Schwerte Art Association

2012 Gallery Roger Katwijk, Amsterdam, Gallery Tom van den Berge, Goes, NL

2011 Great Art Exhibition Düsseldorf (K)

2010 Landpartie, Museum Abbey Liesborn (K)

2009 Minimal Structures,(Works by Giradoni, Jae Ko, Pattscheck) Gallery Katwijk, Amsterdam

2007 Da capo, Lausberg Gallery, Toronto, Canada

Sybille Pattscheck is a painter, there is no doubt about that. But the results of her artistic works are more than paintings or panel paintings; they are pictorial objects, more precisely sculptural bodies of colour that redefine space and capture colour and light as if in a butterfly quiver. This special quality of the creative works develops from the interaction between the painting media the artist uses and the materials on which the painting takes place.

Sybille Pattscheck paints with the unusual combination of wax, pigments and glass, which come together to form three-dimensional, albeit flat, spatial bodies. The interplay of these materials shows that they are similar in their transparency, although they are absolutely different in their density and strength. The soft, supple wax of milky transparency, the volatile, dusty pigment and the crystal-clear, solid glass are combined by the artist to form sculptural bodies of light that - once completed - mutate into energy stores.

An attempt to describe these works may begin with a consideration of the technique used. The artist builds a flat, three-dimensional, box-like picture support out of glass or acrylic glass, similar in function to a stretcher frame, onto which she applies pigment dissolved in wax with broad brushstrokes. She thus uses the oldest painting technique, encaustic, which was already used in antiquity and is much older than oil painting. The famous Egyptian mummy portraits have been preserved, which still show a unique luminosity and freshness today. [...]

Sybille Pattscheck uses such modern bleached wax into which she mixes the respective colour pigment.

She brushes the hot wax onto the glass support with broad brushes. The property of the wax to cool down quickly causes a remaining brush structure on the surface and a slight thickening at the edge of the picture field. At these haptic changes of the surface the light collects particularly and intensifies the luminosity of the colours, which appear deliberately only very thinly scattered in the wax. You can only work with encaustic layer by layer. Each step in the process of creating a painting stands on its own.

The colour pigments that Sybille Pattscheck uses float, as it were, in the carrier material of the wax - as if they were held in the air - which opens up the possibility for the light - actually the rays of light - to move between the colour elements and to trigger this maximum of transparency and luminosity here. [...]

Sybille Pattscheck is a light collector who goes in search of the miracle of light and colour every day and in every pictorial object, which she captures in her artistic works and brings to view for all of us who may encounter her works of art. Always different, always new and always and like recharging stations of optical energy.

Text excerpts by Dr Gabriele Uelsberg