Lars Schubring was born in 1961 in the Ruhr District, one of Germany's major industrial centers. During his youth, he experienced the rise and fall of the coal and steel industry there.

After having finished school, he studied at universities in Germany and the United States. In the summer of 1986, he worked in Washington, D.C. Upon his return to Germany in 1988, he decided to live in Cologne.

Today, he occupies with his family a town house of the 1920s in a suburb of Cologne near the river Rhine. Lars gets inspiration for his work from his friends and family, from his life in the lively city center of Cologne and from his frequent trips abroad.
 
 

Lars Schubring re-transforms digital photos of the physical reality of every-day life into what he calls "digital drawings", thereby reducing highly coloured photos to black & white "photo-drawings" with a pencil- or ink-like quality. Even though Lars works with digital photos, he does not consider himself part of the modern Digital Art Movement. In a way, his art resembles Computer Graphics (CG), a sub-discipline of Digital Art which integrates or alters visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. With this concept, Lars manages to reduce highly sophisticated digital photographs to their intrinsic & abstract characteristic structures. Sharp colour contrasts become black & white shades, the background disappears and the essential features of each motive are moved to the foreground of the picture and into the center of the onlooker's attention.


Lars creates his artwork without adherence to strict dogmatic rules. Instead, he follows his immediate thoughts and feelings, thereby creating a unique blend of computer logic and human intuition. Lars has been deeply influenced by action painting, a style of painting where the artist creates paintings spontaneously, in a child-like fashion rather than by following strict dogmatic rules and principles.
 

  This style was used, e.g., by the painters of the CoBrA group, co-founded by the Dutch painters Karel Appel and Corneille in 1948 together with Danish artists and dissolved only three years later in November 1951. The goal of the CoBrA group was to free art from the norms and art movements of Western art. The group wanted liberation from the emphasis on form and intellect and instead encourage spontaneous painting. Lars deeply admires the work of the members of the CoBrA. This is proof of the fact that the revolutionary ideas and awakening of self-realization of the members of the CoBrA group are still powerfully alive in contemporary modern art. The reason for this continuing impact is that their work posed an important link between rational and irrational, abstract and figurative.

It is exactly this combination of abstract and figurative elements which characterizes Lars' art work. However, apart from the use of modern technology not available in the 1950s, there is one essential difference between the work of CoBrA and his own: while strong colouring was typical for the works of the CoBrA artists, Lars' work is focussed on black & white, while coloured works are to be found only here and there in his oeuvre.