Artist: Sophie Schmidt
Exhibition title: A heavy heart has to be affordable
Curated by: Hannah Eckstein
Venue: Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, Friedrichshafen, Germany
Date: January 1 – June 11, 2023
Photography: ©Kilian Blees / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt is a border crosser in many respects. Her expansive multimedia installations transcend all genre boundaries. Starting with drawings, collages, canvas paintings and murals, into which she often integrates her own texts, they also include sculptures made from all kinds of everyday materials such as sieves, branches, hoses, old wheelbarrows, or oil drums. The artist’s impressive performances often push her to her physical limits as well. Trapped in fragile, usable sculptures – which she calls prostheses – she recites her, with personal experiences imbued texts, sometimes speaking timidly, other times singing fervently.
In her works, Sophie Schmidt translates her view of the world into a universal poetry that lends a fleeting encounter, a smell, existential human feelings such as fear, joy, loneliness, or desire, and even the most banal everyday situation a poignant profundity.
For her first institutional solo exhibition, A heavy heart has to be affordable, the artist has once again created an expansive installation that is also the stage for the opera of the same title, which will be performed at the exhibition opening.
In diary-like sequences, Schmidt lets us participate in her poetics of the Everyday, for which in turn various borderline experiences collected on a trip to the United States are decisive. A travel scholarship took her first to Alaska and then to Chicago.
She has already processed the impressions she has gained on numerous journeys in her exhibitions and artist’s books before. And this time too, she takes us to one of the most remote places in the world, to Anchorage, Alaska. “At the edge of the Round Lake. At the edge of the Round World.” as written in one drawing of the exhibition. She takes us to her Airbnb on the Malibu RD, onto the eternal ice that centuries ago connected the continents and makes us feel the forces of nature in this place so pristine, so hostile to life, that humanity hasn’t been able to subdue it.
Arriving in Chicago, everything that civilisation has to offer culminates. The American Dream collides with poverty and crime, no-go areas with a glittering skyline, and America’s colonial past also manifests itself in the shocking contrast between the rich north and the poor south of the city.
The artist describes all this on a pictorial and textual level in the exhibition’s collages, and drawings, interweaves it with texts by other literary figures, notes and an letter exchanges, and transforms it into an opera in which moods, body parts, organs, tear-antler prostheses, moose, snow, trees, architecture, Anchorage and Chicago take on a life of their own.
From the Pacific Ocean we thus follow Sophie Schmidt to Lake Michigan, to finally find ourselves at Lake Constance. During this journey, she shares with us her multi-layered and profound world poetry.
Sophie Schmidt (b.1986) lives and works in Munich. She studied art education and fine arts in Munich and Vienna and is the recipient of several fellowships. She was awarded a USA Grant by the Bavarian State Ministry for Culture and Art (2022), was a fellow at the Taipei Residency Program (2021), the German Study Centre in Venice / DSZ Venedig (2021) and received the Stiftung Kunstfonds’ production grant A1 (2020) as well as the Jan van Eyck Academie scholarship in Maastricht (2017–18).
Selection of solo shows, each accompanied by performance: 2022: beacon, Munich / 2021: KNUST KUNZ, Knokke-heist, BE; Galerie Tobias Naehring, Berlin / 2020: Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig; KNUST KUNZ and fructa space, both in Munich / 2019: Josilda da Conceicao Gallery, Amsterdam, NL / 2017 – Tanja Pol Galerie, Munich.
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, Chicagohochhausohring, 2023, photos, watercolor, ink on paper, 70 × 108 cm
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, Der Kaffee läuft weiter durch die Brewing Maschine, so sanft und harmlos, als sei nichts gewesen, 2023, photos, watercolor, ink on paper, 112 × 66 cm
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, Wenn der Himmel unter den Füßen beginnt und die Badevorhänge ins Museum gehen, 2023, photos, watercolor, ink on paper, 68 × 100 cm
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, Lass dir dein Haar wachsen, lass dir Zöpfe flechten, 2023, photos, watercolor, ink on paper, 72 × 100 cm
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, Mein Herz kracht, wenn ich dir in die Augen schaue, 2023, watercolor, ink on paper, 105 x 78 cm
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, Jetzt ist es eben so, ich in Alaska, 2023, watercolor, ink on paper, 57 x 76 cm
Sophie Schmidt, A heavy heart has to be affordable, 2023, exhibition view, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Sophie Schmidt, Ich bekomme ein Wimperngeweih aus Schneekristallen, 2023, watercolor, ink on paper, 78 x 105 cm
Sophie Schmidt, In Alaska ist jetzt Kemmer und dem Pfannenschaber wachsen Schamhaare, 2023, watercolor, ink on paper, 76 x 57 cm
