Artista

Ana Schmidt

Alemania

Datos generales
Sin Algoritmo AI

Residencia:

Reside en Bilbao, Vizcaya, España

Premios ganados:

Columbia Threadneedle Prize 2018

Etiquetas:

Figurativo Hiperrealismo Pintura

Enlaces oficiales:

Web

Descripción del Artista

Ana Schmidt is a realistic painter. She presents reality without an obvious style or embellishment; therefore she uses sketches and painting from life, as also own photographs, which she completes with color and composition studies. Ana Schmidt works as an architect and painter. She was born in Germany and grew up in Saigon, Bangkok and Barcelona; nowadays she lives in Bilbao. She focuses her work on urban landscape, how it appears in our everyday experience: during our trips from home to work or in a more technical google earth panoramic view. Both types of images are part of the landscape perception of the modern observer. The pictures of urban landscape try to render visible the territorial changes brought on by the process of urban transformation and sprawl. A google view, as reinvention of the vedutism, and the painting of spaces that normally escape our awareness, as the periphery, the fringes, where ... cities become blurred, try to focus our attention on our urban reality. The issue of these pictures is related to human intervention into landscape. Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of our reality, of our existence. But painting, as a poetic language, creates a kind of vertigo, it exceeds the limits of reality, because it is not reducible to the expression of a code. It implies reversibility. It escapes the fate of language to silence, allowing ambiguity. The detailed and realistic representation suggests that painting is about illusion and creates pure images beyond reality. This is not graffiti approaches the topic, it allows ambiguity, because it represents a painting about painting, about street art. It represents also a second reality, the reflections of graffiti painting on the wet floor. The illegality of street art is often linked to its location, when taken off the street and into the gallery, it is art. Graffiti, street art, arouses such a response, because it changes the way we experience the city, the urban space. It causes an interruption to a commercialized system of signs and codes. The city is a body without organs, and the graffitist themselves come from the territorial order. They territorialize decoded urban spaces – a particular street, wall or district comes to life through them, becoming a collective territory again. (Baudrillard, 1993) Ana Schmidt focuses her work on series. The series of urban landscape try to render visible the territorial changes, the mutation of urban spaces undergone in the past decades. Traces on the territory; red valleys, green hills represents an aerial, distant city. The aerial view neutralizes urban space and makes it difficult to locate human being. Green valleys, red hills is the title of a novel (Pinilla, 2009) that describes the transformation of the region during the past century. The title of the painting inverts the terms, because it reflects the urban development during the last decades, where the valley has been stained with the red roofs of the buildings. The references to literature and history question subjects such as passing of time and our relationship to history and past. Ofelia represents a common landscape, an environment interrupted by highways, almost turned into waste land, a space that normally would escape our awareness, although still beautiful. Ofelia is a character of Hamlet´s tragedy. Her death, as she fell into a stream, has often been painted through history. The picture recreates the scene on the water, but empty, to evoke an image of loss and absence. Other pictures of the series urban landscape concern more violent marks of human impact on the territory. Picture war or war pictures appear everywhere. The perpetual reproduction of mass media creates a second reality. These pictures are reconstructions of photographs appeared in mass media, brought into canvas in modified form. The city is a conglomerate of overlapping and sometimes opposing realities of its users: there are as many cities as people thinking about it.