Martin Schmidt (sculptor)

Martin Schmidt (2007)

Martin Schmidt (* 1963 in Munich ) is a German sculptor and object artist .

life and work

Martin Schmidt, who was born in Munich, completed an apprenticeship as a wood sculptor and carver in Oberammergau in order to base his later artistic work . He returned to Munich to study sculpture, where he quickly became a master student of Professor Olaf Metzel at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts . Already in early projects, such as 'Rohbau' (Munich 1992) or 'Halbesbedarf' (Galerie Die Burg, Burghausen 1992), he shaped his style of taking apparently familiar things out of their surroundings and making them an object of art in order to change our way of looking at things. His object 'Schrebergarten', which he installed in a small green area in the middle ring of Munich in 1994, causing irritation, or the 'sheet metal garage' installed in the Botanical Garden of Munich the following year was also exemplary.

Schmidt became Metzel's assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and, after several individual projects in Kaufbeuren , Dillingen / Saar and Ludwigsburg, received the Villa Romana Prize in Florence , Germany's oldest art prize, the first important award for his work. With 'The Care of the Spiritual Heritage', the first major solo exhibition in the Kunsthalle Mannheim , a catalog of his projects was published in 1992–1999, a first retrospective, initiated by the art patron Hans-Werner Hector . According to Thomas Kollhöfer in his essay on the 'unbelievability of the everyday', Schmidt's objects are “based on well-known patterns of their everyday role model (...) This art thus represents an examination of everyday reality.” Hans-Werner Hector, founder of the Prize, whose first prize winner was Schmidt, writes: "The relatively simple assembly of such objects now, depending on the selection and sequence, leads to different solutions to a problem or to the solution of different problems."

These approaches, put by art historians close to realism, continued Schmidt in large solo exhibitions that took place at the same time in 2002 in the Städtische Galerie Backnang and the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen . As a Villa Massimo scholarship holder of the Deutsche Akademie in Rome , he again dealt with the work of architecture, which he has been the most important guide since his Opus I ('Rohbau', Munich 1992) on the 'Steingarten' (in the Kunsthalle Mannheim 1999) designated by his work. "It's not about architectural styles or architects, but about ways of life, about the question of how people shape their surroundings", as Schmidt writes in an 'Interview with Bernhart Schwenk'.

Schmidt has dedicated himself to this topic since 2003 as a member and since 2005 also as chairman of the art in architecture and public space QUIVID commission of the state capital of Munich, where a certain percentage of the budget for art in architecture is planned for new urban buildings .

Exhibitions (selection)

• "Salone" Villa Romana, Florence, November 21 to December 10, 1997
• Martin Schmidt. Taking care of the spiritual heritage. Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, March 14 to May 24, 1999
• Martin Schmidt. The fruits of our labor. Backnang Municipal Gallery, January 19 to March 10, 2002
• Martin Schmidt. The Golden age. Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, February 3 to April 7, 2002

Awards, prizes and grants

• 1993 Debut Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich
• 1994 project grant from the city of Munich
• 1997 Villa Romana Prize , Florence
• 1997 Hector Art Prize from the Kunsthalle Mannheim
• 2004 Scholarship from the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo

swell

• Thomas Kollhöfer (Ed.). Martin Schmidt. Taking care of the spiritual heritage. , Mannheim 1999.
• Hans-Jürgen Schwalm, Ferdinand Ulrich. (Ed.) Martin Schmidt. The fruits of our labor. The Golden age. , Bielefeld 2002.
• Bernhard Schwenk (Ed.). Martin Schmidt. ROMA , German Academy Rome, 2004

Web links

• Literature by and about Martin Schmidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Projects and dates of the artist with pictures