"Cookware and Towel"

SCH-2011-08

pigment-based inkjet print on Museo paper

Schmidt's photographic oeuvre resembles still-life arrangements in which interiors and objects are lyrically placed in the work. In doing so, the artist wants to illuminate traces of lived history. In Schmidt's works, a high willingness to reflect on his own and other bidders' works can be seen, as is characteristic of some artists of the Leipzig School. In his supposed familiarity with what is depicted, the viewer oscillates between collective and individual recognition. In this way, the artist also wants to point out that history is not only an objective-chronological past, but always a subjectively constructed entity.
In the middle of the current crisis of the global financial industry, the artist Oskar Schmidt re-stages selected photographs by the American photographer
Walker Evans, where, on behalf of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), during the Great Depression at the beginning of the 1930s, he was responsible for the misery of the rural population in the USA.
documented.
Using old, worn materials, Schmidt reconstructs in detail and life-size that which is depicted in Evans' photographs in his studio - a weathered wooden wall with worn aluminum dishes or an old chair in front of it, various details of a poor wooden hut or a piece of worn floorboards with various used everyday objects. He then takes a photograph of these objects with an analogue large-format camera, which then represents the actual work.
The initially sculptural-installative approach is thus transformed into a two-dimensional image, and the documentary habitus of Walker Evans' black-and-white photographs is quoted in order to subsequently subject it to a change both in content and form.
Thus, unlike Sherrie Levine and Appropriation Art, Schmidt does not directly reproduce and duplicate the images of Walker Evans, but instead creates his own new pictorial compositions in the seclusion and the ever-same light of the studio, which are nonetheless read carelessly as Evans' images. By means of an extremely controlled positioning of the pictorial elements and objects, hermetically charged pictorial spaces are created, which nevertheless still have the appearance of the documentary. It is a highly complex staging of an aesthetic of beauty and perfection in the poor, coincidental and incidental - an "Arte Povera" of photography.
The arrangements, which are created over a period of several weeks and recorded with the analogue large-format camera, are then digitally reworked, sometimes with great care, and in the case of some motifs, existing compositions are subsequently altered on the computer.
His method is a reproducing appropriation of already existing photographic images. His earlier works already addressed questions about the role of staging in photography and called up art historical connections. The examination of forms of quotation and reference to already existing "pre-images" is thus also inherent in his new pictures. In his new works, categories such as authorship, authenticity and originality as well as their negations are increasingly questioned, and a moment of irritation arises about origin, production of meaning, legibility and claim to reality, i.e. the location of photographic images today.
The contrast between the present and the past, between simulation and reality, original and repetition - in other words, the complex problem of the real and its duplication through images and the much conjured end of photography - occupies the artist Oskar Schmidt in his latest works.
(Scheublein & Bak AG, 2014)