This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2025 special issue of Monopol Magazine.
»After all, Berlin is New Berlin now, and we fit in well here,« announces a woman in ›Einzel Gruppe Berlin,‹ the video Erik Schmidt and Corinna Weidner made together in 1999. Now, 26 years on, it’s showing in an exhibition at Kindl—Center for Contemporary Art. Here, Schmidt looks back on almost thirty years of artmaking. In that 1999 video, Schmidt and Weidner offered the archetypes of peak Berlin coolness at the turn of the millennium: the advertising agency woman, the DJ, the artist. ›Einzel Gruppe Berlin‹ adopts the style of sensationalist TV specials where the media sought to convey how very terribly alternative life in Berlin was. One of them declared »Berlin is at once the trend barometer and matching service of the international art scene.« Though that wasn’t true at the time, it became true soon enough. Over a quarter of a century later now, it may well no longer be true, to be honest.
Schmidt’s retrospective exhibition (which will travel on to EACC Castelló in Spain) is titled ›The Rise and Fall of Erik Schmidt‹. This perfectly captures the balance he strikes between ironic distance, media savvy, and serious self-examination. »This title is naturally something of a grand Pop Art gesture,« the artist himself says with a smile. Looking back, it becomes clear that Schmidt’s work has most of all been characterized by a strong dualism since the late 1990s: painting here, videos there. »The two may overlap thematically, but ultimately they are two separate strands,« Schmidt says. Curator Yara Sonseca Mas has grouped the subjects treated in his work into loose clusters. These range from the relationship between self and others, questions of identity, maleness, role expectations, as well cities and their surroundings.
In this survey show, one sees how Schmidt’s paintings concentrate more on an outward view, on relating to the world and understanding it by creating images. The artist draws on photographs as sources when painting, acknowledging the fact that the world is one we perceive through media. In the early 2000s, he overpainted photos in magazines, porn, and landscape paintings using camouflage patterns and slogans. Later, his often-pointillist paintings shifted focus to parks, streets, hunting parties
in his home state of Westphalia, and olive harvests in Israel. He painted over the photos of palm trees he took in Sri Lanka, observed the Occupy camp in New York from across the road, and depicted Berlin from above, from the roof of his skyscraper.
Over time, the sources became more evident: the act of translating a mechanically produced image into art increasingly formed the focus. Now, Schmidt sometimes simply uses large blobs of oil paint to depict the individual elements from the photographs he uses as a starting point, thus halting the transformation of world into art halfway. »This conveys a certain decay,« Schmidt says. »These images are brittle. As if they’d fall apart if you gave them a good shake.« His most recent series, in contrast, hearken back to an almost sketchlike style. For instance, Schmidt stopped strangers on the street in Vienna in summer 2024, capturing their likenesses with just a few precise strokes.
Schmidt uses large blobs of oil paint to depict elements from the photographs he uses as a starting point; thus halting the transformation of world into art halfway.
His videos take a wholly different approach. »These foreground a kind of stocktaking: where am I, where do I stand, what’s happening around me?« Schmidt says. In this, he always needs to get to grips with himself and his role as ›the artist Erik Schmidt,‹ as he puts it. In his new video, ›Recap,‹ he looks back on his work over the past decades.
In contrast, his older videos are about seeking out a space into which he fits. This is demonstrated in a video the artist made on moving to Berlin after studying in Hamburg. In it, he drives around in his small car looking for a gap and a place where he belongs in the structure of his new home city. We see him falling into a pool, flailing to remove the tight corset of a business suit. Years later, his videos show him wandering through fog-shrouded fields and pushing his way through hedges; dining with a hunting party at a castle in Westphalia; dancing in aristocratic parties; drifting through the bustle of Tokyo with its tide of office workers; and zipping through Rome alone on anelectric scooter. In short: artist Erik Schmidt is on the go from there to there, moving through landscapes, countries, cities, societies with their class-based echelons—and through his own life.
Kindl starts the show with one of his most penetrating videos, ›Bottom Line‹ (2018). Made some twenty years after ›Einzel Gruppe Berlin,‹ it shows him wandering through ›New Berlin‹ and awkwardly trying to climb the sleek glass facades that have so utterly transformed the cityscape. It’s as though he wants to physically apprehend the changes the city has undergone. Yet each time, he keeps slipping.
Being an artist may offer many possibilities and access. Yet in the end, you’re always a little on the outside, never quite fitting in—to a parking space, a hunting party, or the future you once imagined. Yet for almost thirty years, Schmidt has conveyed an immense freedom and directness through precisely this distance and his profoundly honest, sincere perspective.
›Erik Schmidt: The Rise and Fall of Erik Schmidt‹, Kindl—Center for Contemporary Art, 14 SEP 2025—1 FEB 2026
Credits for images: Erik Schmidt, The Bottom Line, 2018 © Erik Schmidt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025; Erik Schmidt, Neubaugasse, 2024 © Erik Schmidt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025; Erik Schmidt, Glass People, 2024 © Erik Schmidt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025 ;Erik Schmidt, Stone Washed, 2025 © Erik Schmidt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025