Michael Schmidt »Michael Schmidt«

Galerie Nordenhake is very pleased to present a solo exhibition with the German artist Michael Schmidt. The show focuses on his work „Irgendwo“ (Somewhere) from 2001-2004 consisting of a selection of so far 71 images. The meticulously composed black and white photographs, with their rich nuances in the greys, were taken over the course of three years during Schmidt’s extensive journeys throughout Germany. For the exhibition the artist has arranged these images in smaller groups, thereby opening up a dialogue between them and works from the older series „Stadtbilder“ 1976-88, „Frauen“ 1997-99 and „Naturbilder“ 1988-89 “ — some shown here for the first time.

“Irgendwo” presents rather bleak views of province-life in the reunited Germany with suburban houses and village pubs, deserted low-cost supermarkets and historical buildings, as well as distanced motorways cutting through the landscape. Typically for his Modus Operandi Schmidt conflates architectural and landscape photographs with portraits and shots of seemingly unimportant details. It is only through the arrangement in groups - the interplay and dialogue between the images - that the individual images acquire their distinct meaning and the issue of a relation between spatial environment and individual biography comes into view. The photographs, however, do not depict particular places. In his work Schmidt seems to be more interested in tracing the loss of a subjective connection to “home as a place with identity”:

Home says nothing to me. In any case, home is what you carry with you, inside you. You remember places because you spent the most wonderful or the most horrible time there during your childhood. But these places have become more arbitrary, less specific. … There is no such thing as an objective category that one might call ‘home’ any more. Such things take place subjectively nowadays. - Michael Schmidt