bitforms gallery

Lincoln Schatz, Fluid Forms
May 9 – June 15 2002

Chicago artist Lincoln Schatz is unique in the art world. His background is in fine art but he moves freely and fluidly in the digital realm. His skills in the two disciplines overlap and combine to create a distinctly personal language. His show will reflect his citizenship in both the physical and digital world and will transform the gallery into a multi dimensional media experience, including large-scale suspended Plexiglas sculpture, projected digital animations and oversized wire frame drawings. The viewer will start with sculpture, then move to animation and finally return to the drawings. There is no hierarchy or distinction between the physical and digital invoking a future where the physical will seamlessly meld with the virtual. Schatz is at the forefront of this evolution.

Upon entering the gallery the viewer will be confronted with Sophie, a large translucent Plexiglas sculpture consisting of five thick forged undulating shapes hung via stainless steel cable. Continuing his investigations of spatial zones created by multiple suspended translucent and reflective objects, Schatz uses a diaphanous anemone-like shape as the central element of his exhibition. The viewer can walk under and through the floating shapes. Due to its translucent nature, the sculpture will continually appear and dissolve in the space
depending on the viewer’s physical relationship to it.

While the sculpture is the static reality of the physical, the animations depict the poetic world of dreams, drawing from the conscious and unconscious realms. The three animations featured reflect the fantasy of setting sculpture in motion and freeing it from the constraints of physical reality. In each, multiple cameras track the movement of the anemone-like shapes as they respond to cyber gravity and collide with each other and their environments. The forms slowly unfold and surprise the viewer with their rich complexities. Light, movement, reflections and shadow are again primary to this work. An experience echoed in his sculpture.

Schatz’s wire frame drawings are meditations on his language. The ethereal shapes are held together by a matrix of polygons. The ribbon-like edge switches back and forth across the field with intoxicating detail. With their size of over six feet, these drawings, like the animations and sculptures, all function in the realm of the interphysical and phenomenological.

Lincoln Schatz has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Recent exhibitions include: Monika Burian Fine Arts in Prague, Vedanta Gallery, Chicago, Galeria Ferran Cano in Barcelona, Berlin Art Fair, Art Miami, ARCO and Art Chicago. Collections include the Runnymede Sculpture Farm in Woodside, California, Ernesto Ventos Omedes in Barcelona and numerous public, corporate and private collections. His digital animations are featured in MTV’s Real World Chicago. He recently won an international competition that resulted in the commission of “Nimbus” by the City of Evanston, Illinois. Nimbus consists of five 2.5 ton sanded Plexiglas panels, each measuring 15’ by 30’, that will be mounted to the side of a new City building.

Schatz was born in Chicago in 1963, attended Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont and received a fellowship from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. He has been a visiting artist at: Rice University, Williams College and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He resides in Chicago.