Enclosed Figure

Essays

Marianna Schmidt’s work is rooted in a lived experience of war, destruction and violent displacement. Themes of dislocation, alienation and loneliness, sometimes juxtaposed against a wry humour are pervasive and reflect her own experiences as a displaced person during and after World War II.

Her career spanned forty years, plenty of time for Schmidt to experiment with a variety of mediums, including etching, lithography, photography, painting, sculpture and collage. During the 1960s and 1970s, she embraced the Pop Art and Hard-Edge Abstraction movements in a series of silkscreen prints. But the 1980s saw her abandon printmaking for expressionist figurative work, for which she had a lasting affinity. She admired the work of several German Neo-Expressionist artists and during this time created a number of mixed media works on paper exploring figuration and the human condition. In the 1990s, her figures became more stylized and streamlined but still maintained that characteristic sense of alienation. Schmidt drew from local and distant artists and movements, but also from her own experience, infusing her work with a particular poignancy. She worked outside the limelight, with strong feeling for the precariousness of existence and with a particular eye for looks and gestures that create separation between people. As she aged, she immersed herself in collage. Her last important body of work, created in the late 1990s – early 2000s was a series of Xerographic prints based on her original collages.