Bastienne Schmidt Livres

In her latest project, the multiple award-winning artist Bastienne Schmidt offers a minimalist meditation on white space and its perception, inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s “Three Standard Stoppages.” This work utilizes conceptual photography in installations where scale becomes a riddle, featuring objects and colorful markers photographed from a bird’s eye view against a snowy backdrop, transforming the white environment into a blank canvas. The installations are crafted from recycled fabrics and colored threads, continuing Schmidt’s exploration of concepts of space and the systems that define them. The second part comprises mixed media works on Arches paper, featuring a punched grid of 8 x 8 inches divided into one-inch squares that interact with light and shadow. This series reflects a reductive process akin to the artistic pursuits of Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman, presenting a quiet reflection on minimal space. The variations within the squares evoke thoughts of absolute freedom versus absolute constraint. Schmidt’s work is part of esteemed collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C., and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In her latest series Typology of Women, the multiple award-winning photographer and artist Bastienne Schmidt shows a series of hand painted cut-outs that represent silhouettes of different types of women. The term "typology" has been consciously chosen, as it refers to the study or the systematic classification of types that share certain characteristics. The comparison of forms and the study thereof is based on well-known artistic working principles. Bastienne Schmidt's silhouettes in luminous orange also show a feminist and ironic twist to the reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. The multi media artist refers to the outline drawings of ancient Greek ceramics, as well as to Japanese woodcuts, to airytales and to American pop culture.

German-born photographer Bastienne Schmidt (born 1961, now resident in the U.S.) challenges the popular idyll of household as private utopia with her Home Stills series. Posing in the role of lone housewife, and staging her works exclusively in Long Island, the artist recapitulates disconcertingly familiar scenarios excerpted from daytime TV. Following Highway 27 across Long Island from Patchogue to Easthampton, Schmidt recreates her interiors--from cheap motel rooms to upscale mansions--as imaginary rooms of her own, performing a dystopian twist on Virginia Woolf's eponymous idea of a feminist haven. Recalling the work of Cindy Sherman, Schmidt draws on such diverse visual influences as the films of Wim Wenders and the paintings and prints of Hokusai, Sigmar Polke, Jan Vermeer and Edward Hopper, to portray the alienated social contracts of a world of suburban fragmentation and loneliness.

Germany – no easy homeland. Neither is it one for photographer Bastienne Schmidt who – resident in New York since 1988 – is taking a trip with her camera through the country of her birth. The award-winning artist is discovering a seemingly rejecting, severe and dark, sometimes bizarre, place, looking strange and at the same time familiar through her lens. The photographs, which have a great suggestive power, turn the completely ordinary into a seemingly strange and different world. With portraits that exude a certain distance, unusual perspectives and extraordinary details, Bastienne Schmidt holds up a mirror to the Germans and takes the viewer on a provocative journey through Germany’s past and present. Photos : Bastienne Schmidt, born 1961 in Munich, Germany, studied in Athens, Munich and Perugia, lives in New York since 1988. She received numerous international awards including the World Press Photo Award. Awards 1996 Irene C. Fromer Award, Snug Harbor, New York. 1996 Death in America Project Grant from the Soros Foundation, New York. Kodak Book Award for “Vivir la Muerte”, Stuttgart. 1993 German Photoprize, Landesgirokasse Stuttgart. 1992 World Press Photo, Amsterdam.

In Topography of Quiet, internationally acclaimed photographer Bastienne Schmidt takes us on a journey inspired by the conceptual poetry of the natural world and her lifelong travels. Schmidt uses the media of painting, drawing, and photography to explore the patterns and typologies of nature and the imagination. The subtle and intangible relationship between these two worlds is brought out through delicate complex paintings and drawings juxtaposed to striking photographic compositions that reveal rhythms and patterns that fill the space surrounding us.