David Schnell: Hover Book

The up-and-coming Leipzig painter David Schnell (b. 1971) employs elements of landscape in all of his edgy, large-scale canvases, but he is by no means a traditional landscape painter. A younger contemporary of Neo Rauch and Tim Eitel, Schnell uses oils, tempera and acrylics to render obsessive spaces that often feel as if they might engulf the viewer. Relying on very strong linear perspective and vanishing points to create his idiosyncratic pictorial order, where even the trees are perfectly straight vertical forms, he often seems to counteract that very order with a subliminal, hyperactive energy that buzzes through the paintings--perhaps suggesting a critical stance towards our treatment of nature in contemporary society.