Sophie Schmidt at beacon

Artist: Sophie Schmidt

Exhibition title: Luft zu Haut

Venue: beacon, Munich, Germany

Date: January 30 – March 10, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and beacon, Munich

beacon is delighted to present Luft zu Haut, the first exhibition by artist Sophie Schmidt to focus exclusively on painting.

Sophie Schmidt’s (b. 1986) artistic practice ranges across a variety of media. Her multilayered œuv-re encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and text. Schmidt interweaves these forms of expression into a densely enmeshed, narrative structure. Her leitmotif throughout is the human body and its potential openness to a state of ‘being-in-the-world’, thus permitting it, in its essence and experience, to overcome the ontological dualisms of material and immaterial entities such as feeling and thought.

Sophie Schmidt’s work attests to a re-examination of the concept of human being and explores the body as a space of possibilities. In this approach, the visible material form of the person is not considered as physically complete: the artist expands corporeal envelopes, extends limbs, or entirely transforms the body. Fictitious hybrids appear, newly connected physical and emotional combinations, which can liberate utopian potential. Perception and appearance, set free from established norms and categories, come together in her works. As fantastical manifestations, they narrate their own hypothetical form(ul)ation and recount their liberation as energetic phenomena.

In the Luft zu Haut exhibition, which bears the same name as the artist’s most recent cycle of work, the body is again her central thematic focus. The title references the notion that air can become a form of skin, that the atmosphere enveloping a body becomes an element of its physical sensation. Concentrating for the first time solely on painting and text, the exhibition speaks of internal body images searching for expression, of emotions and excitement, and always of dissolving the clearly defined boundaries of essential and material structures.

While the abstraction on canvas permits categorisation of recognisable motifs, it nevertheless completely defies explicit interpretation. The text integral to some works, an écriture automatique typical for Schmidt, is an element of the expressive performance on which the paintings are based. Physical boundaries dissolve to form visions. Time after time, the artist also transcends temporal barriers, encountering figures and narratives from the past in her dream-suffused present. The eponymous Schneehuhnfrauen [ptarmigan women] are just such time-travelling beings. In fierily glowing images, the boundaries between avian plumage and aspects of the human body dissolve. These merge on the canvas into a simultaneous perception of physical realities open to multilayered and multifaceted interpretations.

Sophie Schmidt, Luft zu Haut, 2022, exhibition view, beacon, Munich

Sophie Schmidt, Schneehuhnfrau I (Dein weiches Fell, das aufsteigt bis zur schneeigen Hornspitze), 2022, Acrylic, crayon, chalk, snow on canvas, 200 × 200 cm

Sophie Schmidt, Schneehuhnfrau III (Aufplusterung, Wimpern und Zorn im Gefieder), 2022, Acrylic, crayon, chalk, snow on canvas, 200 × 200 cm

Sophie Schmidt, Schneehuhnfrau in Samt, 2022, Acrylic, crayon, chalk, charcoal and snow on canvas, 200 × 200 cm

Sophie Schmidt, Schneehuhnfrau V (Wir müssen Butterstücke essen), 2022 Acrylic, crayon, chalk, snow on canvas, 200 × 200 cm

Sophie Schmidt, Schneehuhnfrau IV (Lass uns nochmal tanzen), 2022 Acrylic, crayon, chalk, snow on canvas, 200 × 200 cm

Sophie Schmidt, Schneehuhnfrau II (Sind es deine Zähne, die dir aus dem Schopf wachsen?), 2022, Acrylic, crayon, chalk, snow on canvas, 200 × 200 cm