In An Old Story, Galerie Brugger brings together a selection of late paintings that present familiar subjects by Hubert Schmalix. The exhibition places figurative works alongside landscapes and still lifes, tracing how personal experience enters forms already shaped by art history and visual culture.

Schmalix’s figures inhabit spaces reduced to a concise pictorial vocabulary. Expansive fields of color are held by emphatic contours, producing images that appear immediately legible while resisting precise identification. Although their visual language draws upon comics and historical painting, the figures remain detached from any defined narrative. Their gestures imply a situation without disclosing it, allowing individual states to take on an archetypal character.

The identities of these figures remain equally open. The older man, characterized by his white beard, could recall Schmalix in later life and move between cultural archetype and self-image. The monumental long-haired young man in An Old Story may, in turn, be understood as an image of youth. Carrying the severed head of his older self, he brings two moments of a life into a single pictorial constellation. The encounter suggests a form of anticipatory mourning, shaped by an awareness of aging and the distance that gradually emerges between earlier and later versions of the self.

The landscapes and botanical works are similarly constructed through flattened planes and bounded fields of color. They do not describe identifiable topographies but draw upon established pictorial conventions through which nature has long been imagined. Embedded within these depictions is an emotional attachment to the act of looking at landscape. Each scene carries its own mood, guiding perception through the particular atmosphere of the image. Landscape for Schmalix becomes less the record of a place than a visual form through which feeling is organized.

Across the exhibited works, Schmalix’s painting moves between figuration and abstraction without establishing a hierarchy between them. Narrative recedes as color and surface become primary. Familiar images remain suspended between collective memory and personal experience, open to meanings that extend beyond their apparent clarity.


September, 2026