Superficiality — Photographs on Canvas by Peter Schmid

Peter Schmid (Mindelheim/Unterallgäu), a lacquerer by trade and full-time editor of the trade publication DER MALER, is also a photographic artist who has exhibited on numerous occasions in southern Germany. His works, which are printed on a canvas background, focus on the seemingly inconsequential things that often bear unmistakable traces of time and of transience. In the process, Schmid deliberately selects details of his subjects and transforms them into abstract shapes of a powerful colour and form, which thereby provoke new associations in the viewer.
“An abstract photograph, and the formal arrangement of the picture, can evoke new images in our mind,” explains Dr Helmut Heß from the Munich Photography Museum. “In the end, the original object has nothing left in common with the new motif. We only become aware of the superficiality of seeing through a recognition of its profound nature.”
The enlargement onto a canvas medium creates autonomous works that additionally blur the boundaries between painting and photography. Not that Schmid uses highly specialized equipment. In fact, he works with an old analogue reflex camera, and the pictures are not manipulated or processed by computer in any way. In the larger works featured in this special exhibition, the initial subject matter is created with paint, brush and palette knife. Schmid then selects the details he wants, photographs them and enlarges the result on a canvas background.

Entrance North and Hall 6, booth A48/B49