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There are those of us who have spent a considerable amount of time trying to express what Bridgehampton artist Bastienne Schmidt excels at.She creates a personal iconography that serves to decipher and reflect the paths and experiences that illustrate our individual existence—the remains of coffee grinds and foam swirled against a mug, a Lego piece found at the bottom of a handbag, a marked-up road map from a foreign country visited.
All evidence of a life lived.
“Topography of Quiet” is Ms. Schmidt’s fifth book, which she will be signing on Saturday, June 28, at Ille Arts gallery in Amagansett, against a backdrop of her own work, currently on view. The book incorporates photographs, works on paper and mixed media paintings that sublimely illustrate her own topography—one that is both deeply personal and accessibly universal.
A native of Germany and Greece, Ms. Schmidt has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Museum and East Hampton’s Guild Hall, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among many others. Her work reflects a life of travel and contemplation on ideas surrounding routes and roots.
“My mind and eye were trained to compare things: roof lines, trees, city layouts, languages,” Ms. Schmidt explained during a recent interview at her home in Bridgehampton, which she shares with her husband, photographer Philippe Cheng, and their two sons, Max and Julian.
Indeed, Ms. Schmidt speaks several languages fluently, including English, which she speaks with what she jokingly refers to as a “generic European” accent.
One of five children, Ms. Schmidt was born in Munich to Uta, a bookstore owner, and archaeologist Gerhard Schmidt. When she was 9 years old, the family moved to the remote island of Samos in Greece. As a girl, she went to “every archaeological exhibition and site imaginable,” viewing literally hundreds of thousands of fragments of ancient civilizations and observing her father make these fragments, over painstaking years, into wholes.
With her own art, she works “pseudo-scientifically with processes,” she explained. It’s a layering technique that comments on organizing, mapping, and “trying to understand studies and systems,” she said.
Ms. Schmidt studied art at the Accademia di Belle Arti Pietro Vannucci in Perugia, Italy. At age 24, while living in Italy, her father was diagnosed with leukemia, and she returned to Greece to be with him. That experience, of “all of us being with him when he died,” she said, began a years-long investigation into death and grief rituals among different cultures.
She moved to Manhattan in 1989 and worked for photographer Ralph Gibson, “learning by doing” as his assistant while doing documentary photography work for magazines in New York and Germany. In contrast to photojournalism, Ms. Schmidt could be with her subjects for longer, documenting specific experiences over an extended period of time—an approach that was a good match to her interests.
It was during this time that she had the opportunity to embark on her exploration of death and culture, traveling for a year in South America to photograph varying and deeply personal documentations of death rituals. The project led to exhibitions at the International Center for Photography and the New Museum, both in Manhattan, as well as her first book, “Vivir La Muerte.”
Naturally, Ms. Schmidt’s work—and life—has evolved over the years. She married Mr. Cheng in 1996, and the couple moved to Bridgehampton with their young son, Max, in 2001—followed shortly after by their second child, Julian, in 2002.
It was when they built their house on the East End that she finally had the studio space she needed to return to mixed media works and paintings. She calls moving to the Hamptons “the best decision we ever made,” but with it came an obstacle all working families, particularly creative professionals, face: “how to make it work, to be a family and be two working artists,” she said.
The house, which Ms. Schmidt and Mr. Cheng helped design, is an open floor plan with nooks for sleeping. It is full of light, both direct and indirect, and Ms. Schmidt says it was conscious to have, “an open flow between life and work because that’s how life is.”
She soon found herself exploring domestic life in her work, culminating in her 2011 book, “Home Stills.” In it, there is a photograph that reads more like a painting: several rows of leftover soap chips and little plastic toys on a textile background, paralleling the ceramic fragments her father meticulously collected.
In her most recent work, Ms. Schmidt mixes coffee grains, lint and soap into ink and polymer paint, reflecting what’s left behind in everyday life. The topology of stains—what patterns or textures trace materials leave behind on the page—are of great interest to her. She uses fabric and transparent paper, cutting and layering the materials with drawing elements, and finally paints over the whole. Influenced by the scroll format of Chinese and Japanese art, Ms. Schmidt’s techniques create several dimensions at once, a “seeing from far away and from up close,” she explained.
The stains and layers are like memories, she said, intrinsically linked to works that also deal with “connecting and unconnecting.” In moving full-time to America—and gaining American citizenship—she was surprised and fascinated by a culture that is dependent upon cars, instead of the European systems of trains connecting villages to each other over a smaller landscape. The shapes of highways and the textures of roads and waterways populate “Topography of Quiet.” She even, at times, uses strings dragged through pigment in complex, cloverleaf, highway-like patterns that resemble jellyfish tentacles, or an allusion to string theory. Identity and place are threads that move through all of her work, with one project informing the next.
Every year, Ms. Schmidt travels back to Greece with her family, and for work to places such as Burma, Egypt, Morocco and Vietnam. While in Greece, she draws and photographs, “going back again and again to this sense of place and home” that still inspires new ideas for her art, she said.
Her next project, which she says may take a total of 18 years to complete, from beginning to end, will be titled “Archeology of Time.” It will explore the passage of time, she said, “for instance, seeing our kids grow and how we shift our perspective around that, the way villages shift, in a Proustian way.”
The beginnings of this body of work can be seen in her urn series—works on paper of simple, beautiful shapes painted with polymer pigments and coffee that are reminiscent of the urns her father unearthed. She is now adding to this a series of painted fragments—like little Rorschach chips—lined up on a clean paper field, reflecting the organization of pieces that perhaps were once whole, and may be again.
Bastienne Schmidt will be signing copies of her book “Topography of Quiet” on Saturday, June 28, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Ille Arts gallery in Amagansett. A solo exhibition of the artist’s work will run through Tuesday, July 8. For more information, call (631) 905-9894, or visit illearts.com.
on Jun 24, 2014