Looking at photographs means to visualize the past in a picture. With his new work, the artist Oskar Schmidt makes us aware of the fact, that this form of „sighted memory“ concerns not at least the history of photography itself. We have the impression, that we already know the very concise, reduced to a sober black and white imagery of Schmidt's "American Series". In fact, none of these pictures has existed until lately. But they all refere to those photographs taken by the American Walker Evans during the Great Depression in Alabama. Schmidt takes up this legendary photographic series from 1936 and compresses it to insistent still lifes that seem fallen out of time. It is an irritating feeling of timelessness which occurs in these tableaux. (Prof. Dr. Steffen Siegel)
Oscar Schmidt's work has been showed lately at the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig (2011), the Art Collection Deutsche Börse (2010), C / O Berlin (2009) and are currently shown in the Zabludowicz Collection in New York.