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Michael Schmidt, Germany's grayer portrait painter

2021-09-22T13:35:18.745Z


The Reina Sofía Museum is hosting a retrospective of the photographer, with 340 images from his half-century of career


From the first photograph of the exhibition, that of a lying girl with only her head and a thread of blood that starts from her nose, to the final portraits of young women dressed almost identically, passing through the urban landscapes of Berlin, the retrospective images that the Museo Reina Sofía dedicates to the German Michael Schmidt (1945-2014) convey a concern, a mystery, an invitation to ask what lies beyond what we see. Self-taught photographer, “not very well known in Spain”, as the director of the Reina Sofía, Manuel Borja-Villel said in the presentation this Tuesday, this exhibition with 340 images, almost entirely in black and white, allows us to know the trajectory of almost half a century of those who struggled to find empty Berlin corners of people and, at the same time, those who inhabited the city,to create a fresco away from the vision of a Germany as the euphoric engine of Europe.

PHOTO GALLERY: Retrospective of Michael Schmidt

'The wall and the spider'.

By Manuel Vicent

Michael Schmidt.

Photographs 1965-2014

, the first retrospective since the creator passed away, runs until February 28, 2022 and is curated by someone who knew and cooperated with Schmidt, fellow photographer Thomas Weski. "He worked on a style until he mastered it, then he decided to abandon it," he said. Thus he jumped from photojournalism to abstraction, from highly contrasted images to those that display a whole range of grays. Schmidt was born in October 1945, among the ruins left by the bombs of the Second World War, and lived through the division of his city and the erection of the Communist Wall. “His family lived in the western part, but he had his business in the eastern part. With the Wall they could not pass to the other side, so they lost it and fell into a situation of poverty. That's why Michael received a very basic education, ”added Weski.Although he began his training as a painter, his interest in photography prompted him to offer his services to the authorities of the different districts to document urban and social changes.

The first commission was in the neighborhood where he lived, Kreuzberg, where immigrants from southern Europe were arriving due to the lack of German labor due to the division of the capital. He captured it with a sober style, which refers to masters of the American documentary tradition, such as Walker Evans. Among those images, taken between 1969 and 1973, the one of smiling children sitting on the curb of a street with their bare feet in a large puddle stands out. Schmidt published this work in a successful book that he himself designed, the seed of a constant in his career: thinking about how his work should be displayed, whether on paper or on museum walls. The models, books and contacts in the showcases of the rooms help to understand this process. The Reina Sofía has respected the criteria of the artist,That is why the montage is changing according to each project that he carried out: the images have different formats, different frames, or sometimes they lack them; they are shown in series ... The exhibition could be seen in Berlin and Paris, and after Madrid it will travel to the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

One of the images of the work 'Berlin-Wedding' (1976-1978).

The first turn in his journey was made by Schmidt with the following work, another commission, between 1976 and 1978, from the Wedding district. In it he opted for a more documentary photography to show people in their homes with jaded gestures, gray lives in gray tones. "Michael said that 'life is not a party', he wanted to reflect normality, that's why seriousness dominates in those portraits," said the curator. The author then theorized about the reasons for this bet: “Gray is a color of differentiation, no matter how strange it sounds, and white and black are two fixed states. I thought that the world is not clearly defined, but is presented in multiple nuances. That's what I tried to eliminate black and white. " With that idea he photographs corners of a city with covered skies and a soulless aspect, and delves into it in his project

Berlin after '45

, 1980, a succession of wastelands, buildings with peeling walls, almost a ghost town, an abstract vision with a large-format camera.

Schmidt, for whom each image had to “harbor a shock within it”, takes his dedication to photography to the field of education.

"He was gruff at times, hostile because of his blunt speech about photography, but he could also be charming and persuasive," Weski noted.

In 1976 he was one of the founders of an adult photography workshop in a neighborhood center in Kreuzberg that became a forum for the exchange of ideas and exhibitions of European photographers.

'Untitled', photograph belonging to the project entitled 'U-ni-dad', 1989-1994.

It is significant that with German reunification, in November 1989, Schmidt decided to focus outside of Berlin, in part because he bought a house in the country. Then he created what, according to the curator, is one of his great contributions,

U-ni-dad

, which was exhibited at MoMA, in which he took photographs of photographs and continued with his previous motifs, portraits and the city, to review the German political systems of the 20th century, with numerous references to the Wall. It is a dense project, more difficult for the viewer to digest.

With the turn of the century, he focused on German youth, especially them, "because he believes that they are more subject to social impositions," according to Weski. Always in search of new ways of expression, despite the risk of failure, he defines himself as a photographer “of dead ends”. His last great work is

Food

, from 2008, with which he traveled to several European countries to document the food industry. Schmidt first used color, a metaphor for the use of colorants in food. In the case of Spain, greenhouses, olive groves ... in other places it reproduced pasta, fruit, slaughterhouses, greenhouses ... to show "the standardization of what we eat." Until the end he carried out his need to "live a process of constant transformation", as he himself said: "It is a vital principle that at the same time constitutes an artistic principle".

Source: elparis

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