Erik Schmidt

The Claire Gastaud gallery presents for the first time the Berliner artist Erik Schmidt and dedicates to him from March 5, 2022 to April 16, 2022 a double exhibition in its two spaces in Paris and Clermont-Ferrand.

A graduate of the Hochschüle der Künste in Berlin, Erik Schmidt is a key artist on the Berlin scene, painting gures and large views of the city. Observation has an important place in his practice. These shots, captured with his camera become digital prints on canvas. Views of Tokyo from his residency in 2015 where he photographs the streets in a tangle of electrical wires and tall buildings. Erik contemplates the city. From the street or from the top of buildings. Other works are animated by passersby or perspectives. Erik Schmidt works on large canvases where the paint is deposited in thick, pastel-colored strokes. There will also be videos in which Erik Schmidt stages himself in Japan and in a Berlin stroll.

German artist Erik Schmidt creates works that focus on symbolic processes within various social subsystems. Immersion in foreign contexts plays an important role in his paintings, videos, photographs and drawings. Throughout his work, Schmidt continues to consciously adopt the figure of the outsider, whether in the crowded urban landscape of Tokyo, in the camps of the American Occupy movement, among wine and olive producers in the West Bank or in the aristocratic hunting circles of his native North Rhine-Westphalia. This secluded position affords him a distinct insight into group dynamics and the various clichés, stereotypes, codes, rituals, norms, patterns and conventions they all convey.