Natur

With his series of black and white pictures of German landscapes, created from 1987 to 1997, Michael Schmidt designed a new visual language that deconstructs the world presented to him. As works of light and form, Schmidt's pictures are characterized by an abundance of silver tones and a spectrum of gray tones, the interplay of light and dark developing imperceptibly and in an almost mystical way. By using filters, Schmidt is also able to neutralize the world, which makes the subjective perception of the viewer more difficult. Using this processing step, a process of assembly, Michael Schmidt creates his own idiom and, with the linear sequence of the images in the book, a self-contained world. Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945. He died there on May 24, 2014, a few days after NATUR was printed. With his photographic work, Michael Schmidt has created some of the most important works of his medium. He became known through his books, in particular Truce (1987), U-NI-TY (1996), Berlin nach 45 (2005) and Lebensmittel (2012). He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Food (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin 2013 / Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck 2012 / Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen 2012), Gray as Color. Photographs until 2009 (Haus der Kunst, Munich 2010), Women - EIN-HEIT - Menschenbilder (Kunstverein in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 2000) and U-NI-TY in the Museum of Modern Art, New York and in the Sprengel Museum , Hanover (1996). He took part in many group exhibitions, most recently Consumption: See more