Erik Schmidt Kunst / artworks

Ich war sofort begeistert als ich die Berlin Bilder von Erik Schmidt sah. Erinnerungen an die bisher spannendsten Jahre meines Lebens wurden durch die immens kraftvolle Malerei wachgerufen  (Matthias)

ERIK SCHMIDT
born in 1968 in Herford, Germany, lives and works in Berlin

Erik Schmidt‘s work deals with the observation of symbolic processes within various social subsystems. Clichés, stereotypes, codes, rituals, norms, patterns, conventions or roles are of particular interest to him. He studies and experiences them in the context of various, socially marginalized groups, such as the occupy-movement, which Schmidt dissolves in a painterly manner from photographs into an infinite field of color and forms.

His works focus on the city and inhabitants of his hometown Berlin. For this purpose, the artist not only climbed buildings, towers or rooftops and photographed from there the expanding state territory - squares, functional areas and architectural landmarks - but also captured young posers and passers-by in the streets. The colors, applied as impasto to the enlarged prints of the photos, overlay the portraits and cityscapes, condense into fields or patterns over and over again, but also allow the underlying photographs to shine through, laying themselves over the bodies, buildings and roads like a fabric. In the city panoramas, individual picture elements and details such as passers-by, facades or scaffolding are sometimes highlighted in color, or the movement lines of the streets or suburban train paths are traced, thereby mapping the grid, order and dynamics of the city. The color traces and streaks applied to the portraits transform the imaged persons and transfer them into a second, affective pictorial space. (Galerie Krinzinger 2021).