Sybille Pattscheck

(* 1958 Wesel)
in Cologne (Pulheim)

1980-86 Art Academy Münster, studied painting with Ulrich Erben (master student)
1986 Studio scholarship from the city of Münster
1987 Sponsorship award from the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe
1988 Working scholarship from the state of NRW in Ringenberg
2018 Art Prize of the Artists, Major Art Exhibition Düsseldorf

Solo exhibitions / selection
2018 Gallery Strelow, Düsseldorf, Pictures 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 Reichsabtei Kornelimünster
Kunstraumno 10, Mönchengladbach
Painted Moments, Kunstverein Heinsberg

Exhibition participations/ selection
2020 Abstraction, Galerie Strelow, Reasons To Be Cheerful, Galerie van den Berge, NL,
2019 35th overview 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 Large art exhibition Düsseldorf (K)
2013 33rd overall 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 Large art exhibition Düsseldorf (K)
2010 Landpartie, Museum Abtei Liesborn (K)
2009 Minimal Structures, (works by Giradoni, Jae Ko, Pattscheck) Gallery Katwijk, Amsterdam
2007 Da capo, Gallery Lausberg, Toronto, Canada

There is no doubt that Sybille Pattscheck is a painter. 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 used by the artist 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, even though they are completely different in their density and strength. The soft, pliable wax with its milky, cloudy transparency, the volatile, dusty pigment and the crystal-clear, solid glass are combined by the artist to create sculptural bodies of light which - once finished - mutate into energy stores.

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

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

She spreads the hot wax onto the glass support with broad brushes. The wax's ability to cool quickly results in a remaining brush structure on the surface and a slight thickening at the edge of the picture field. These haptic changes to the surface are where the light gathers in particular and intensifies the luminosity of the colours, which deliberately appear only very thinly scattered in the wax. You can only work with encaustic layer by layer. Each step in the process of creating a picture 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 trigger this maximum degree of transparency and luminosity. [...]

Sybille Pattscheck is a collector of light 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 light for all of us who may encounter her artworks. Always different, always new and always like recharging stations of optical energy.

Text excerpts from Dr Gabriele Uelsberg