Sophie Schmidt
Born 1986 in Starnberg, Germany. She lives and works in Munich, Germany.
Works
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Käferpriester mit offenem Herz, 2020
Oil, acrylic and charcoal on canvas
Contact Gallery
200 x 160 cm
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Ich bekomme ein Wimperngeweih aus Schneekristallen, 2023
Tusche, Tinte und Aquarell auf Papier
Contact Gallery
78 x 105 cm -
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Warten am Isarufer in Reih und Glied am 7. August, 2018
Ink and watercolor on Bütten
Contact Gallery
60 x 80 cm
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About
BIOGRAPHY
Sophie Schmidt was born in Starnberg in 1986.
In 2016, she completed her MA degree at Munich’s Akademie der bildenden Künste. Before, in 2014, she studied at Vienna’s Akademie der bildenden Künste on an Erasmus scholarship. In 2017,she spent a year in Maastricht, Netherlands, where she was a fellow at Van Eyck Academy. In 2020 she received a prestigious scholarship from the German Stiftung Kunstfonds and in 2021 she was a scholar at the German Study Center in Venice, with a studio grant of the State of Bavaria. The same year she had a residency at Taipeh Artist's Village, funded by the Munich Department of Art, Goethe
Institut Taipei and the Taipei Culture Foundation, TWN. She received the USA Grant of the Bavarian State and spent months in Alaska and NYC in 2022.
Schmidt had a Studio Grant from 2019 to 2022 from the Bavarian State, and currently another one from the City of Munich (until 2025).
ABOUT HER WORK
Sophie Schmidt’s artistic work is diverse, including first and foremost performance, along with series of drawings, collages, paintings and sculpture, installation, and the writing of texts that accompany her works or stand for themselves.
In her performances, Sophie Schmidt moves with the elegance and agility of a dancer, not incidental here are her charisma and her clear voice, with which she accompanies the movement and actions of the performance. Her appearance, coupled with the awkwardness of her props and installations, in which she crawls about lissomely, bows down, and bends, or spreads herself out, generating a universe all her own that is immediately fascinating. Her sculptural props, marked by an imaginative bricolage and an unexpected wealth of detail, are always convincing and can sometimes continue an existence as autonomous sculptures beyond their performative use.
Language is an essential element in Sophie Schmidt’s artistic cosmos, her neologisms (“Bauchigung [stomachening],” "Brustigung" [breastening], "Seelenmoos" [soul moss], "Lungenflügler" [lungwinger]) are poetic, and at the same time very direct. The artist brings physicality, movement, language, space, volumes and materiality together in her visions.
Her drawings and collages in small and large formats on various papers are very sensual, in terms of both their materiality and what they represent. Their gesture is simultaneously strong and tender, we can see anthropomorphic, animal bodies, volumes, lines, cross-hatching, dense scribbles to emphasize certain spots and parts of drawings: one cannot avoid thinking of physical unions of great intimacy.
RECENT EXHIBITIONS
2024
Mothertongues in Carrybag, Knust Kunz Gallery Editions, Munich, DE
2023
The World is now licked with the Tongue, strobe, New York City, USA
Ein schweres Herz muss man sich leisten können, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, DE
2022
So weit wir auch fahren, so nah wir auch kommen, Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig, DE
2021
Bauchvorhangöffnung, Galerie Tobias Naehring, Berlin, DE
Venetia Regina, Domus Civica, Venice, IT
How much Venice water do you carry in your legs, still? And how much Taipei water do you feel in the fields, now?, Frontier Gallery No. 9, Treasure Hill Artist Village, Taipei, TWN
2020
Knieberge, Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig, DE
One last glory of the legs, KNUST+KUNZ, Munich, DE
2019
It Might Change, Josilda da Conceição Gallery, Amsterdam, NL
2017
Gurkenfresserzahnung vor der Urmuttermilchlegung, Tanja Pol Galerie, Munich, DE
Publications
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Sophie SchmidtKatalog
Über die Tragik des menschlichen Körpers
Eine Oper in fünf Akten, 2020Text: Sophie Schmidt
518 pages, numerous colored images
published by Hammann von Mier Verlag, Munich 2020
