Michael Schreiber *1949 – 2012
‘The interplay of light and shadow creates realities that stimulate the viewer’s imagination, prompting it to begin developing its own spaces of light. The inner becomes the outer, and the outer becomes the inner.’
Michael Schreiber was born on 4 March 1949 in Bremen. He studied art under Prof. Mayer at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he was a master student of Prof. Petrick. From 1997 to 1999, Michael Schreiber was a lecturer in painting and foundational studies at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. As a freelance painter and graphic artist, he can already look back on considerable success in the art market.
Schreiber made his home in Berlin and in his adopted country, Italy – a country whose evocative atmosphere is reflected in many of his works.
Schreiber’s talents lay in painting, whether in large-format oil paintings on canvas or small-format watercolours. In his graphic works, he favoured the technique of lithography, as this printing process, using a stone, comes closest to a painterly approach. Yet the artist also demonstrates great mastery in his drawings.
Schreiber’s works are atmospheric images. They play with skilfully chosen perspectives and poetically staged reflections of colour and light. His most recent landscapes – endless fields and tree-lined paths – offer the viewer a place to find peace and linger. They stretch into vast depths in the form of deserted spaces – unspoilt, sensuous and rugged. Naturally fleeting impressions are masterfully captured in Michael Schreiber’s works through his compositional skill. Although the depictions are representational, they seem detached from reality insofar as the dimension of the temporal and the fleeting is eliminated. Based compositionally on various pictorial axes and horizon lines, the pictorial elements – rendered in richly nuanced colours – form a harmonious whole. Time and again, the various elements – such as air, water and earth – merge seamlessly into one another.
However, Michael Schreiber was not merely a landscape painter. His body of work also includes numerous portraits, musical studies and architectural depictions. Magnificent Italian buildings, house façades and loggias recur as motifs, forming a symbiosis with the surrounding natural vegetation. In these works, too, the artist sought to capture light through his painting.
Michael Schreiber transports the viewer into a world of painterly illusions. Masterful in their technique and captivating in their evocative quality, the artist’s works are a sensitive invitation to surrender to nature and art. With a lyrical sensibility, the artist articulates what he has seen, but above all the atmospheric essence of a peaceful natural world, thereby tapping into the very roots of human existence.
Michael Schreiber passed away in Italy in July 2012.