The miscreant, the social outcast, the Dostoevskiian idiot, the innocent and the lost – it is the perennial outsiders, those figures that are either ignored or serve as objects of punishment in real life, that appear most at home in the oil paintings and mixed media collages of Christian Schoeler. Typically (though not exclusively) young men, his subjects’ facial expressions and bodily contortions ultimately reflect their profound situation of enforced detachment. His anti-heroes stare back at us – or else turn their backs on us completely to observe the landscape – daring us to find in them projections of our own darkest fears and traces of lost memories. In Schoeler’s words, “My work is about a sort of love affair – not between me and the model, but between the viewer and the model.” The artist is currently participating in Galerie Urs Meile’s three-month ‘artist in residence’ programme in Beijing. His first solo exhibition in China will feature works created as a result of his experiences in China, from which we will be able to observe his approach within the context of a western artist in contemporary China.

- Text by Travis Jeppesen