Schneise. 2000.
Charcoal drawing over Egg tempera on canvas.
Signed and dated on verso. 180 x 280 cm (70,8 x 110,2 in).

We are grateful to Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin, for his kind support in cataloging this lot.

EXHIBITION: Leipziger Lerchen, Kunstverein und Staedtische Galerie Speyer 2002.
David Schnell/Malerei, Galerie Kleindienst Leipzig 2002 (ex. cat. with illu., no p.).

David Schnell belongs among the main representatives of the "New Leipzig School", which is regarded an outstanding artistic phenomena within contemporary figuration. Artists of the "New Leipzig School" completed their academic education at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig (Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig), where they were taught by the protagonists of the first and second generation of the "Leipzig School" such as Werner Tübke, Sighard Gille, Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer or Arno Rink. David Schnell, born in Bergisch Gladbach in 1971, studied in Leipzig from 1995 to 2000, eventually completing his education on a scholarship from the state of Saxony as master student of Arno Rink.

David Schnell’s focus is on landscape painting, next to portrait, history picture and still life a genre of its own in art history. David Schnell’s images show forests, meadows, clearings or fields functioning as superordinate props. This way he creates scenes that receive their particular charm through the interplay of naturalness and artificiality. The experience of the landscape is not merely guided by pure experience of nature – the eye of the observer is vexed by surreal parts such as the hovering laths or the seemingly functionless bar put in the ground. Additionally David Schnell constructs visual worlds that captivate and guide the observer’s eye with their central point-of-view and their visible composition lines. It seems his pictures show the attempt of man to subordinate nature to order and structure, which is why his paintings can also be understood as critical of culture. The large painting offered in our auction is a both early as well as characteristic examples of David Schnell‘s pictorial language. It shows a perspective into a tree-lined clearing. Which at first sight seems idyllic with the rich colors and the small birds house in the foreground, soon turns out to be a strictly organized grid of tree trunk formations. Even a look onto the small piece of horizon is deceiving, as it follows the same rigid pattern.

In 2002 David Schnell and artists like Tilo Baumgärtel, Christoph Ruckhäberle, Martin Kobe, Jörg Lozek or Matthias Weischer founded the gallery "LIGA" in Berlin. Up until its closure in 2004 "LIGA" made important contributions to the rank of the "New Leipzig School" and offered artists a highly acknowledged presentation platform - David Schnell‘s works were shown in the solo show "Wandertag". Internationally renowned museums and collections have set up both group and single exhibitions with work by the artist, for instance the ‘Museum der bildenden Künste‘ Leipzig (2002 and 2003), the Kunsthalle Mannheim (2006), the collection Essl in Klosterneuburg near Wien (2006), the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico (2007) and the Gemeentemuseum The Hague (2010). [KP].