Klaus Schmitt EARLY BIRD

16.08.2008 - 21.09.2008

We are pleased to announce the second single exhibition of Klaus Schmitt (born in 1955, living in Mönchengladbach) in our gallery rooms. The exhibition is entitled early bird. On the one hand this title refers to a little model of a temporary large sculpture, which Klaus Schmitt will create in a park in the early autumn of this year. On the other hand the title contains a reference to the artistic reactions in the time after modernity and minimal art, which at the present time again are up-to-date.

»Schmitt is in his works searching for the precarious point, which never can be found once and for all, but consistently has to be defined again – based on this point artworks can advance to existential questions with their individual and irreplaceable instruments… Exactly because of this many of his works only exist temporarily. Shapes and evidences of an ostensible eternal value do not belong to Klaus Schmitts repertoire.« Dr. Peter Lodermeyer, Bonn

In the current exhibition Klaus Schmitt shows some works, which especially are designed for the spatial situation – for example the black corner or a white coloured relief hanging on a wall. But beside those he also shows a surprisingly contemporary work entitled »Stall« (1985) in the central room of the gallery, which deals with the problems of space, identity and movement. Here Schmitts studies of the minimal art are coming to be evident. This also applies for the sculpture in the entrance area, which can be traced back to drawings and drafts of the early 1980s. His understanding of sculpture and space Schmitt also has used very intensive in the medium of painting during the last years. Exemplary therefore is the watercolour »Netz«, which Klaus Schmitt has mounted on a carrier composed of wooden slats, which appears like a cutout from a sculptural body. The big canvas »Red Star«, in which Schmitt objectifies the ambivalence of spatial extent and concentration in time, seem to be an interim endpoint of this discussion.

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