Vanda Vieira-Schmidt

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Vanda Vieira-Schmidt 2017

Vanda Vieira-Schmidt (born November 19, 1949 in Berlin ) is a German art brut painter and concept artist .

Life

Vanda Vieira-Schmidt 2017

Vieira-Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1949, she grew up in Madeira and has lived in Berlin again since she was 19 . There she worked as an au pair girl and did various apprenticeships. She then worked as a beautician and then took painting lessons from private teachers. At the age of 46 she went through various severe psychological crises. From that point on, she began painting and drawing with exuberant productivity. She has lived in inpatient assisted living since her crisis . It sees itself as a superego medium, i.e. that is, she believes that God acts through her. She is still working on her artwork today (work in progress) .

plant

Vanda Vieira-Schmidt paints and draws against the evil in the world. She came to artistic creation relatively late, but quickly developed her own artistic language. Since the mid-1990s, she has covered countless A4 sheets of paper with magical motifs such as characters, patterns and numbers with her pictorial formulations. Every day around 10 to 100 watercolors and drawings are created, sometimes even 1,000 a day. The aim is to protect people from evil forces and to establish world peace. She is working on her “world rescue project”, as she calls it, and talks about her work on a “paper battery” or “video clips”. So far, an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 sheets have been created. This corresponds to an approximate weight of around three tons of paper.

Compared to the conceptual artists, such as Hanne Darboven , who also deals with writing drawings and numbers and works on operations, the work of Vanda Vieira-Schmidt is much more extensive. Because she sorts her entire work into secluded stacks, the patterns and symbols become a conglomerate of utterances that only Vieira-Schmidt himself can see, but which remain alien to the viewer. It decides what should be visible.

In the meantime, you can also buy individual sheets of her work. The Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg sells originals by Vanda Vieira-Schmidt. For this purpose, Vieira-Schmidt donated leaves and the proceeds will go to the expansion of the Prinzhorn Collection.

In 2005 she had to move out of her assisted living apartment. In the basement there was a pile of sheets of paper as well as a chair, a table, a piece of prose and a brochure from Madeira. There was a risk that the work would be thrown away because there was no space in the new quarter. In her perplexity, her supervisor turned to the Prinzhorn Collection , which immediately knew how to assess the artistic value of the work. Thomas Roeske offered to temporarily exhibit the work in the foyer of the Prinzhorn Collection (2005–2008). At the same time, however, he was looking for a permanent location where the plant could linger. He found this in the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden. Since the reopening of the museum, permanent residence has been ensured.

Movies

• 2018: "I am Vanda Vieira-Schmidt, the author of The World Rescue Project"

Exhibitions

• 2007: Exhibition in the Prinzhorn Collection (Heidelberg)
• 2008: Museum Bochum
• 2009: Kleisthaus in Berlin
• since 2011: Military History Museum Dresden
• since 2011: permanent loan in the theme course "War and Memory"
• 2016: New Museum in New York in the exhibition "The Keeper", in which the world rescue project is shown

Exhibition catalogs

• Sabine Hohnholz (Hrsg.): War and madness: art from civil psychiatry to the military and World War I. Works from the Prinzhorn Collection . Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-88423-481-5 .

Web links

• "I am Vanda Vieira-Schmidt, the author of The World Rescue Project" (documentation, available on Vimeo )
• PDF of the Prinzhorn Collection (document from the Prinzhorn Collection)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ David, Nathalie: 7 days with Vanda Vieira-Schmidt. Retrieved May 31, 2016 . 
2. ↑ Schulze, Karin: Spiritist Art: Dada or gaga? In: Spiegel online. February 16, 2008, accessed May 31, 2016 . 
3. ↑ Hohnholz 2014.
4. ↑ World rescue projects - kulturwest.de
5. ↑ Federal Government Commissioner for the Issues of Disabled People (Ed.): 7 Years of Art in the Kleisthaus 2001 - 2008 . Berlin 2008 ( behindertenbeauftragte.de [PDF; 22.0 MB ; accessed on June 11, 2016]).