SUMMERACADEMY.AT | Lunch Talks

Location: Alte Saline Hallein
Language: German and/or English

Dierk Schmidt's painting often has a specific focus - cases from history, art history or politics. Each "case" looks afresh at the possibility of a translation, an arrangement, or a criticism in painting (after questions of method, picture support, references, location, etc.).

In practice, this means that the process of painting is accompanied by different methods of research, investigation and production of pictures in other media, each case being rendered by means of an appropriate concept. Dierk Schmidt will use two examples of this heterogeneous practice to explain his method.

At the 2010 Summer Academy, Dierk Schmidt is directing the class Painting as a Narrative Form in the Alte Saline Hallein.

Oturupa, Okahandja/The Division of the Earth (detail), 2006
The possibilities offered by painting in debate over current political events and the contemporaneity of history are questions on which Dierk Schmidt has focused in his pictures and pictorial series since the mid-1990s. In his paintings and text-based works, he is greatly concerned with a critical review of painting, including experiments with the discredited genre of the historical painting and the political traditional lines of modern painting.

Dierk Schmidt is born 1965 and lives in Berlin.

Solo exhibitions

2009 Aus: Die Teilung der Erde, Materialien und Zeichnungen, Galerie Walbröl, Düsseldorf; SIEV-X. Zu einem Fall verschärfter Flüchtlingspolitik oder Géricault und die Konstruktion von Geschichte, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main. 2008 Widerruf, Teil 2 in 'Die Teilung der Erde - Tableaux zu rechtlichen Synopsen der Berliner Afrika-Konferenz', Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.

Group exhibitions

2009 Randzonen der Bilder, Kunsthaus, Dresden. 2008 1. Brussels Biennial, Brussels. 2007 documenta 12, Kassel. 2005 Paradiesische Handlungsräume, Secession, Vienna; Tauchfahrten, Zeichnung als Reportage, Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; Be what you want but stay where you are, Witte de With, Rotterdam.

Publications

Die Teilung der Erde. Tableaux zu rechtlichen Synopsen der Berliner Afrika-Konferenz, will be published in spring 2010.

SIEV-X. Zu einem Fall verschärfter Flüchtlingspolitik, b_books/polypen, Berlin, 2005.
What you buy is your problem, Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel, 2004.

Dierk Schmidt