From his early ink drawings to his bulbous-nosed paintings, his quirky girl portraits and sublime mixed-media collages, Michael Scheurer’s creative output has been marked by ingenuity, wit, detail and balance. Again and again, the Cincinnati native has proven he has the artist’s eye.
“I’m always telling people, ‘Check that out. Look at this,’ ” Scheurer, 62, says in a phone interview. “As an artist, you’re pointing out things that might be subtle and they wouldn’t have noticed.”
Now, the Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center downtown has created its own collage from nearly 50 years of material. Signature Scheurer is a retrospective curated by assistant director Kelly O’Donnell, who has been archiving Scheurer’s work.
All-seeing eyeballs — glass beads, cutouts from medical texts and old portraits, even stand-ins like a seashell, a compass and lures — are prominent in Scheurer’s art. There is so much to take in — from the big-picture view of the artist’s evolution to the little treasures hidden in plain sight — that you owe it to yourself to see the exhibit twice. Immediately, you meet the gaze of a big blue eye staring from a surreal collage that’s been reproduced as wallpaper. Then you see another eye protruding from a framed assemblage that’s hung against this unsettling motif. It wasn’t until a second visit that I noticed the numbers on the frame — perhaps remnants of a clock — and the faded work of a previous artist on Scheurer’s makeshift canvas.
The Clifton resident sees possibilities others don’t as he collects castoffs in his work as an antiques dealer and specialist in tribal art. Scheurer bought file cabinets from a Northside monument maker because he was drawn to a special feature of their contents — the linen backing on old pictures of sample tombstones. He flipped the photos over and gave the mounts a second life as canvases for his Paint Series, with the headstones’ manufacturing specifications peeking between black splatters and becoming part of his art.
“I think nothing makes Michael Scheurer happier than to play with expectations,” O’Donnell says. Eyes glued onto a Girl Series portrait might glance in the “wrong” direction, so they appear to follow the viewer. During the show’s installation, gallery director Dennis Harrington learned that he had hung one ink-covered collage incorrectly — yes, Scheurer did intend for the boys’ faces on a bit of ephemera to be upside down.
As happenstance (or the appearance of happenstance) guides Scheurer in making a collage, he might paste an animal snipped from a coloring book next to an exquisite botanical drawing, both atop a torn page of foreign 19th-century handwriting. Each piece loses its context for a moment, then finds purpose again. The result is an abstract that means nothing and absolutely everything at once.
“He’s playing with the immediate perception of what collage should be,” O’Donnell says. “And that, to me, is signature Scheurer.”
Scheurer is mostly self-taught. He took classes as a youngster at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, but studied textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He gained notice with a solo show at the Contemporary Arts Center in 1988 and in the past eight years has been exhibiting more frequently. He works amid piles of stuff in his apartment.
“I care about the art like crazy, like a religious kind of devotion,” he says. “I see old work and I want to change it and I can’t.”
Sometimes he takes his “babies” with him when away from home, just to make sure he is ready to let them go.
Childhood pen-and-ink drawings included in the retrospective suggest that as far back as 1970 Scheurer recognized he was an artist. His “Ziggy”-like cartoon character from those days sits befuddled amid arithmetic problems. Scheurer cleverly initialed and dated his work with an equation, but he wouldn’t follow in his dad’s footsteps as a math professor.
“It’s not like I’m going to be deprogrammed and become an accountant,” Scheurer says. “When you are visual like that, you cannot go back.”
SIGNATURE SCHEURER runs through June 18 at the Weston Art Gallery. Free. Gallery talk with Michael Scheurer 7 p.m. May 24. More info: westonartgallery.com.
This article appears in May 24-31, 2017.