Xylographie Radicale
By Dieter Schrage
Michael Schneider, an excellent printmaker and graphic artist, who studied with Prof. M. Melcher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, predominantly uses woodcutting as a means of expressing his creativity. First of all it is the wood, the wooden plank, the printing-block-to-be that is important to him. In most cases the “finds” the wood on building sites or in similar places. The traces of its former function - and thus its use within time - the signs of aging are essential to him. He creatively includes these traces and all the typicalities of the material, the grain, the knotholes in his non-representational compositions - a sensitive juxtaposition of dark, hardly worked-out surfaces, engraved lines and incised light spaces. Cutting he CULTivates the wooden block, which he then often presents like an art object (e.g. in his 1991 exhibition at Theseustempel, Vienna/Austria). Wooden block and sheet of paper; Michael Schneider hardly ever produces series of prints, not even minimal series of, say, three prints. His prints are now mostly singe prints, and in taking his radical xylography even further he may one day simply present the wooden block, the piece of wood he has found and CULTivated.
From: Ding O.T. - WOODCUTS by Michael Schneider. Landeck 1993 (back side of the catalog)
Dr. Dieter Schrage (1935 - 2011) was Art historian, living in Vienna/Austria.
English translation by Mag. Susanne Costa