Art Los Angeles Contemporary

January 19-22, 2012

Florian Schmidt
Art Los Angeles Contemporary

This solo presentation brings together five distinct, but interrelated series of work: Hold, Position, Presence, Community and Division. Combined, the assembled pieces provide new iterations of Schmidt’s open-ended process whereby fragments and remnants are reconstituted into unexpected configurations of surprisingly delicacy. Constructed from elementary shapes, including imperfect squares and rectangles, the works are often partially covered with lacquer, silicon and vinyl or embellished with cardboard and wires to expose and emphasize their underlying armatures. Perhaps best described simply as ‘constructions,’ these abstract assemblages build smoothly from one to the next in a loose system that foregrounds the act of making.

Within this field of production, Schmidt makes certain associative distinctions. For instance,
Hold refers to monochrome paintings held together by wooden frames; Presence indicates
three-dimensional wall reliefs that articulate their armature, Division are sculptural frames that negotiate space, while Community are small scaled pieces derived entirely from scraps and cut offs. However, far from a formal taxonomy, these categories remain unfixed, simply gesturing towards one possible iteration among many. In this, questions of language come to bear on process, giving the term “work” a particularly loaded meaning that emphasizes the act constant renewal and reconstitution. Schmidt’s material propositions thus eschew the constraints formal compositions in order to explore the possibilities of space and the ongoing currency of the painterly gesture.

Florian Schmidt was born in 1980 in Raabs & Thaya, Austria. He studied at the College of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the U.S.,including Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna; Ancient and Modern, London and Zach Feuer, New York. Schmidt currently lives and works in Berlin.