Bastienne Schmidt

About this book

"With her latest project Grids and Threads, the multiple award-winning artist Bastienne Schmidt provides a minimalist meditation on the concept of white space and it's perception. It is inspired by Marcel Duchamp's 'Three Standard Stoppages, ' in which three imaginary measuring devices underline the arbitrariness to qualify and quantify something. On one hand conceptual photography is used in a series of created installations, where the sense of scale becomes a riddle. Objects and colorful markers are photographed in the snow from a bird's eye perspective, using the white environment as a blank canvas. The installations were built with recycled fabrics and colored threads. It is a continuation of Schmidt's artistic search for concepts of space and systems that define them. The second part of the project consists of mixed media works on Arches paper, where a punched grid of 8 x 8 inches is divided into one square inch spaces, which draw light and shadow onto the white paper. The idea of creating a series of a never-ending variation of white squares in a reductive process is related to the artistic search of Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman. The square grid in white is a quiet reflection on the concept of a minimal space; the variations, of what happens inside of the squares, play with the thought of absolute freedom and absolute constraint"--Publisher's website.