Solo Show

„Afterwards I stand in front of a chrome and acrylic Washmobile bathroom sink – with soap dish, cup holder, and railings that serve as towel bars, which I bought at Hastings Tile to use while the marble sinks I ordered from Finland are being sanded – and stare at my reflection (...).“ Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Andreas Schmitten develops his sterile architectural hybrids from urban borrowings, model making and set design. He transforms windows and shop fronts, the skeleton to every urban city, into sculptural stagings. They do not hide their anthropogenic construction, but highlight a humane blank space. “In his shape and material oriented language, the work refers to the semantics of a man-made world which has discarded its immediate human presence.”

Schmitten combines coloured fabric arrangements with glossy or dull artefacts, that resonate with profane objects or works of historical art pieces. The juxtaposition of different surfaces, which are arranged between travesty and veiling, creates a sensual-haptic paradox. These model-like variables are enhanced in Schmitten’s work to a final, sacral object. The result is a chimera of deliberate staging strategies, seemingly solemn and futuristic, creating a distance in terms of time and function.

Alienation and seduction mechanisms are recurring themes to which Andreas Schmitten devotes himself. His large-format drawings are schematic manuals that describe a user’s destructive handling of the respective consumer goods. They are insights into a world of things that goes beyond their integrity. The human body becomes an objective accomplice, a material that can be modeled or even disappear. Schmitten astutely analyses the mechanisms between bodies and objects and their contexts.

Andreas Schmitten was born in 1980 and graduated in 2012 as a master-class student in sculpture with Georg Herold at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Andreas Schmitten’s works have been in the Philara collection since 2013 and amongst others, in the permanent installation Spectator’s Choice of 2016. Andreas Schmitten lives and works in Düsseldorf.