Hannes Schmidt
May 15 - June 19, 2004
opening reception Saturday, May 15, 7-9 pm
Nice & Fit, a new space in Berlin is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Berlin based artist Hannes Schmidt. It is also the gallery’s inaugural show.
He will present three installations, two in a blacked-out environment and one in a semi-dark room. Hannes’ work inverts the logic of much recent art that relies on technological tools, by going back to basics, while creating striking ‘epiphanies’ of objecthood.
His sculptures often involve customized slide projections onto three-dimensional structures of various materials. His choice of ‘object’ is connected to a history - his own, his culture’s - and to the way that things ‘hit him’. For example, ‘La Storia’, which comprises of an Ikea bookcase, a collection of 300 replicas of books in his parents home and their photographed covers projected on them, is meant to express his genealogy, despite the fact that he has not read the better part of these books; still, as he says:
“ I can’t get over the fact that these books have a lot to do with who I am, so they are a kind of archive of indirect influences.
I still stand in front of them like I did when I was a child discovering more and more details just by looking at the titles. I wonder if I will ever get to read them.” A non-parenthetical point is the Marxist bent of the collection, which is nevertheless the collection of a West German couple.
‘A.A.O’, (am angegebenen ort), is a structure that resembles a doghouse, or a little temple/ashram/hideout. It’s made out of found pieces of wood and it incorporates two cushions. The interior is customized by Hannes, and references the idea of ‘free collage’ as an expression of creativity and assertion of identity. The roof is translucent while a video projection of a leafy tree makes it the ideal oneiric place for imagination to take flight.
“Dreammotor” is a projection of male desire. The image of a Suzuki, a fast and sleek motorcycle is flashed on a blue foam and wood bike structure that the artist has sculpted in the traditional mode of ‘marble sculpting’. He really sculpted it out, yet purposefully leaving it raw. The artist says: “It’s important to me that these projections are simply ‘surface’ but the three-dimensional effect reanimates the emotional reactions that photographs must have elicited in the very early days. The whole thing is based on the ‘effect’, which spurs emotions that a real motorcycle might, but it’s simply not there” |
