Christiane Gerda Schmidt Art for Sale at Auction

Christiane Gerda Schmidt is a mid-career German artist working primarily in drawing, printmaking and painting. Her practice investigates our relationship to our natural and built environments. In particular, she examines the role that leisure, or "communing" with nature, plays in that relationship. In our eagerness to experience the purity of nature, we build roads, chair lifts, viewing platforms, amenities, etc, to allow us to commune conveniently and efficiently. The process of enhancing our experience of nature eventually destroys it.

Even within our cities as we attempt to "greenify" our spaces, there remains the artifice of landscaping. Much of Schmidt's recent work is in pencil, or a combination of pencil and printmaking. This choice of medium underscores the tenuous bond between us and nature, as works on paper are more fragile than linen, and pencil is easily smudged or erased unless handled with care. Schmidt also pushes the boundaries of the printer's convention of working in limited editions when she mixes woodblock printing and pencil drawing in the same work (e.g.) Schneise and Schneise.

While she can faithfully reproduce the woodblock component of the work for each three prints of the edition, the drawn component is created anew for each work. It is therefore impossible to replicate the pencil foregrounds exactly to meet the conventional requirements of "limited edition"; the subtle differences in each pencil foreground across the editions is unavoidable and becomes a key feature of the work by reinstating a uniqueness into what we see before us