Katharina Schmidt
Belsunce, 2013- 2015, digital printings and drawings, 85 x 120 cm each and 29,7 x 21 cm each. Installation view: Le Cube - Independent art Room, Rabat, MA, 2015
The work developed by Katharina Schmidt is a work that makes sign, or we better say that the objects she has decided to work on are signs. Starting from elements she notes and redesigns from our everyday life environment - packagings, wallpapers, cities, streets, apartment complexes and other buildings - the artist has developed a repertoire of patterns and shapes that serves as basis to her work which will finally takes place between the white walls of the exhibition space in order to drown the viewer into a space redefined according to her good will. Passing without any complexes from an abstract drawing to a figurative watercolor, Katharina Schmidt uses each of these elements she creates as serial patterns that can be then edited, printed or repeated endlessly on a given surface / space (a sheet of paper, a curtain, a wall, a room) until the making of a certain modern tapestry in which the pattern becomes sign. A process by which the artist highlights the pattern as she distances us from it. A process that reminds us that the border between figuration and abstraction is thin.
Hosen#BdBoisson, painting on wall and cardboard, digital printings, mixed media. Installation views: À l'heure de dessin, Château de Servierés, Marseilles, 2015
Hosen#BdBoisson, painting on wall and cardboard, digital printings, mixed media. Installation views: À l'heure de dessin, Château de Servierés, Marseilles, 2015
Hosen#Passerelle#Brest, posters, silkscreen, wallpapered in: muster/stadt/modell/stadt, La Passerelle, Brest, 2011
The apprehension of the surrounding space is made by a sensitive reading of it, such as the use of rubbing abandoned houses walls, but also by a certain distancing of the latter, as in the drawing the artist makes by memory of the places she has been to. Using that process, the artist is creating a sort of generic views of our contemporary environment.
Centre Bourse, 2005-2008, excerpt from a series of 28 watercolors, 29,7 x 21 cm each
Noeuds, acrylic on window, Installation view: Mehrwert 116, Interfood-Vitrine, Aachen, 2007
Centre Bourse et autres lieux, posters, silkscreen wallpapered. Installation view: galerie RLBQ Marseille, 2009
WK8P2 et autres lieux, posters, drawings, silkscreen, wallpapered / WK8P2 Oberflächenarchiv, Rubbing, 2003. Installation views: galerie Interface, Dijon, 2010
WK8P2 et autres lieux, posters, drawings, silkscreen, wallpapered / WK8P2 Oberflächenarchiv, Rubbing, 2003. Installation views: galerie Interface, Dijon, 2010
By the reappropriation of some of the specific characteristics of every spaces she is invited to work on, or exhibit in, by mixing codes usually related to architecture, Katharina Schmidt plays with our perception of the space (exhibition space as intervention space) and takes us into a world whose foundations and other constructions lines are still visible.
Text by Alex Chevalier
Courtesy of the Artist
Katharina Schmidt
www.katharinaschmidt.com
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