Galerie im Taxispalais

Michael Schmidt

Lebensmittel (Food)

The German artist Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945. The Galerie im Taxispalais is the first Austrian institution to present his large-scale photographic essay Lebensmittel (Food). Schmidt travelled around the continent of Europe from 2006 to 2010 and photographed the production, processing, packing and presentation of food. A total of 177 shots taken in bulk bakeries, abattoirs, fish farms or agricultural businesses inform us about everyday life in the various food trades. Viewers see harvest helpers at work, fish frozen into blocks of ice, freshly sliced sausage products or packed tomatoes. The places where Schmidt takes his photographs are just as unrecognizable as the majority of the food produced and processed in Europe is anonymous: he has no truck with local references, shifting the general into the foreground instead. In the individual photographs, he usually places the objects frontally in the image, or uses a gentle top view to shift them into an almost scientific perspective enabling concentrated observation. The view opens up in depth only in the landscape shots. Schmidt’s visual approach is characteristically lucid and hard. The serially analytical view of the fish-farm cages or apple washing plants is sometimes reminiscent of objective photography in the 1920s. But it is precisely the contradiction between the latently optimistic attitude of classical photographers, who set their industrial production motifs within a perfect aesthetic and Schmidt’s realistic viewpoint that creates an unsettling impression when viewing the project as a whole. This pictorial language creates a portrait of the basics of our existence that is universal and powerful to an equal extent.

Michael Schmidt is famous for his large-scale series, on which he usually works continuously for three to five years. Even though he has worked intensively on great producers of photographic documentary such as Walker Evans, for example, his style cannot be pinned down. He sets the realistic against the documentary, subjective treatment of the object, including the human being as object, against the objective. And despite the unmistakably contemporary nature of every project, the different series always convey a strong sense of historical awareness, pointing well beyond the moment when the shot was taken. Schmidt adopts a singular position in contemporary photography with his constantly new approach to photographic and social questions, and his innovative, project-style way of working and his commitment are seen as exemplary for a generation of young photographers.
In his famous series Waffenruhe (1985-1987) and EIN-HEIT (1991-1994, about the reunification of Germany), both presented as solo exhibitions in museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Schmidt mixes his own photographs, sometimes extensively and without making any distinction, with photographs by others. In these works, Schmidt successfully instilled such rich nuances into the achromatic colour grey that it can be perceived as a colour value. And now some shots have also been produced for the Lebensmittel project in which Schmidt gently pushes the principle of finely calibrated grey scales into the sphere of colour photography.

In cooperation with Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin


Michael Schmidt
1945 born in Berlin. Lives and works in Berlin and Schnackenburg a.d. Elbe

Selected solo exhibitions:
2010 Grey as Colour. Photographs until 2009, Haus der Kunst, München; 2005 Irgendwo, Kunstverein Heilbronn, Heilbronn / Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg / Arp Museum Rolandseck, Remagen; 2000 Frauen – EIN-HEIT – Menschenbilder, Kunstverein Düsseldorf;
1996 U-NI-TY, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Sprengel Museum Hannover; 1988 Waffenruhe, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Museum Folkwang, Essen / Fotohof Salzburg; 1981 Michael Schmidt – Stadtlandschaften, Museum Folkwang, Essen

Selected group exhibitions:
2010 6. Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin; 2006 Of Mice und Men, 5. Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin; 2005 Zwischen Wirklichkeit und Bild: Positionen deutscher Fotografie der Gegenwart, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo / The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto / Marugame Genichiro Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Shikoku; 2003 Cruel und Tender, Tate Modern, London / Museum Ludwig, Köln; Jede Fotografie ein Bild, Pinakothek der Moderne, München; 2000 How You Look at it. Fotografien des 20. Jahrhunderts, Sprengel Museum Hannover / Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie Frankfurt/Main; 1997 Positionen künstlerischer Photographie in Deutschland seit 1945, Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin; 1995 3. Internationale Foto-Triennale, Esslingen; 1993 Industriefotografie heute, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Neue Pinakothek, München; 1989 Kunst als Fotografie - Fotografie als Kunst, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin