Jan-Ulrich Schmidt

Jan-Ulrich Schmidt (* 1976 in Usingen ) aka Janus is a German artist. His work includes painting, photography, video and sculpture. Schmidt lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and Weilrod im Taunus.

Life

At the age of ten he decided to attend the music boarding school of the Limburger Domsingknaben . Concert tours to Rome and the USA followed. After graduating from high school, he studied fine arts , psychology , design , art history , educational and political science and cultural education at schools in Heidelberg , Mainz , Kassel , Marburg University and Offenbach, and was a master student of Ansgar Nierhoff . Jan-Ulrich Schmidt was a founding member of the artist group “Kunstlicht”, which was founded in Wiesbaden in 2002 and dissolved in Berlin in 2011. He has been teaching at Giessen University since 2017.

plant

Viewing the work of Jan-Ulrich Schmidt requires a step-by-step approach, which takes place along central works. Works from the period 2003 to 2011 are analyzed here. Further information can be found using the publications and web links listed below.

Schmidt's work has a distant look in which traces of personality remain visible. In “Daten” from 2003, striped patterns are formed by the different colors of the stacked materials. Vacation photographs, blank but also written papers are layered on a worktop. If a conventional filing system provides for content sorting, order has been created here on a purely formal level. In place of the usual personal notes, there is order itself , which becomes the leitmotif in Schmidt's work.

The work “Memory” from 2008 continues an all-over structure, at the same time takes up the relevance of the models from art history for Schmidt's work and his relationship to the painterly tradition. On one wall there are cards in various combinations of stripes. The game is remembered not only - as there, two identical cards are randomly distributed - but the cards go back to image excerpts from the imaginary museum of strip pictures and to such diverse positions as Barnett Newman , Max Bill or Bridget Riley . The reference to the tradition of painting is continued in the following projects: In color teachings , such as that of Joseph Albers, binding rules for color design are established. Jan-Ulrich Schmidt plays with these rules: Clearly recognizable structures and objectivity are asserted, for example in "Alphabet", however, like that in "Rosnaes", this order is based on a survey in which test subjects were asked to assign combinations of numbers and letters to colors - an alphabet emerged that in the end cannot be deciphered. (Essential parts of this text are taken from the summit meeting catalog and were written by Dr. Antje Krause-Wahl and used with her consent.)

For "company", Schmidt distributed his stripe pictures to friends, but also recruited artists via Facebook and newspaper advertisements , who could then do whatever they wanted with these pictures. From subtle changes to completely painting over the picture with black paint to converting it to a lamp, a wide range of changes resulted. So far he has worked with more than 40 artists from Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, the USA, China, Indonesia and Korea - including Sebastian Meschenmoser .

In the latest work, Jan-Ulrich Schmidt moved from encryption to decryption. With a program developed for him, he uses the computer to analyze the colors of the works of old masters and presents them in a sorted manner. Again, the irony in the title “The Caspar David Friedrich Code”, through which the connection between high and low culture of Art and kitsch are brought into focus.

Exhibitions

2017
- "By invitation", Villa Claudia, Forum for Current Art, Feldkirch
2016
- "Der Kern", New Art Association Gießen
2014
- " Obsession ", QuadrART Dornbirn - Place of Contemporary Art, Dornbirn (Austria)
2013
- " Animal pieces - from the SOR Rusche collection" - Museum Abtei Liesborn , Wadersloh
2011
- Performance exhibition, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, Berlin
- (be) interpret, 48h Neukölln, Frieda Martha Tannhäuser Project, Berlin
2010
- 10 × 10 - 30 years of Kunstverein Siegen eV , Kunstverein Siegen Group exhibition
- something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue / Kunstlicht 6, Kunsthalle m3, Berlin
2008
- Intermediate stand , exhibition of the artist members of the Württemberg Art Association Group exhibition
- company- EINblicke VIII , Galerie Erhard Witzel, Wiesbaden Solo exhibition
- Summit , Municipal Gallery Mörfelden Group exhibition / catalog
- Emy Roeder Prize - Young Rhineland-Palatinate Artists , Kunstverein Ludwigshafen Group exhibition / catalog
- Under thousand , Galerie Haas, Ingolstadt Group exhibition
2007
- at the moment, Nassauischer Kunstverein , Wiesbaden
2005
- Atelier class , Kunstverein Ludwigshafen
2004
- 54 × 37 × 27 , Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe, Ettlingen
- Class studio , Dům umění | Museum of the City of Brno, Brno, Czech Republic
- Simultaneously - Zeitzeichen , Haus der Kunst, Wiesbaden

literature

Der Kern , Kunstverein Gießen and Quadrart Dornbirn , 2018, publisher: Transformzone, Frankfurt, text: Klaus Honnef , Bonn
By invitation , Villa Claudia, Feldkirch, Austria, 2017,
company , catalog for the solo exhibition, Galerie Erhard Witzel, 2008
Summit , Municipal Gallery Mörfelden (monograph), 2008
54 × 37 × 27 , Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe, Ettlingen
class atelier , Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, 2005
Fabrics, actions, installations , book for the exhibition series 2004
polycentric , exhibition documentation 2003, edited by Jan-Ulrich Schmidt, ISBN 3-00-013266-X
Artificial light , documentation on the exhibition project with Nicole Ahland, Jan Brockhaus, Dirk Brömmel and Vanessa Heyde 2002–2005
Simultaneously - Zeitzeichen bbk Germany 2004
Class , studio catalog for the exhibition at the Kunstverein Ludwigshafen 2005

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Schmidt, Jan-Ulrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Janus (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German artist
DATE OF BIRTH	1976
PLACE OF BIRTH	Usingen