Katarina Schmidt

Signs have a central place in Katharina Schmidt's work. They often come from packaging, advertising brochures and user manuals, and through an ethereal formal language they refer to forms of architecture (La Grande Motte...) and public works (motorway flyovers...). Sometimes they are increased in number until they envelop space (and spill over from it), and they are repeated ad infinitum on wallpaper and curtains... Either silkscreened, drawn or painted, they unfurl like a serial motif, an element of décor based on which the artist questions our environment.
With this work involving "invasive signs of the world", Katharina Schmidt combines a precise practice of monochrome water-colour painting and drawing. Focusing on casting her eye on remarkable kinds of architecture (Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation) and more trivial forms (a shopping centre in Marseille), she introduces the means for an at once sensitive and distant reading of reality. Katharina Schmidt's work is based on an exact grasp of the space surrounding us, her spare and detailed gesture is aimed more at the infinitesimally small than at the effect, and in this way she manages to accurately draw the world's construction lines. Translated by Simon Pleasance