Biography

Born in Wiesbaden in 1972, the artist first studied communication design at the Wiesbaden Fachhochschule and then, from 1999 onwards, completed her studies in free art at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the classes of Dieter Krieg and Albert Oehlen, with whom she graduated as a master student. Numerous artist-in-residence programmes have taken the artist to Austria, Iceland, Canada and Spain. Her works are regularly presented in galleries and museums. In her formally very different groups of works, Helga Schmidhuber processes inspirations from nature and natural science; she uses everyday objects from occult or magical sources as well as found objects such as bones, wood, shells or feathers. Often, piles of paint form the starting point for her multi-layered compositions. Drawing details overlap with gestural abstractions in bright colours, animals such as lemurs or pigs dominate alongside human figures alienated by feathers or other natural found objects. The artist often works in groups of works. For the series 'Wünschel', for example, Schmidhuber wrapped and decorated branch forks left behind by a tornado in the artist's garden with colourful cloth wrappings and exaggerated them into artistically occult wishing routes. An energetic mesh of ideas, symbols and emotions speaks from all the works, pointing to a dimension that goes beyond the reality of things.

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Objects by Helga Schmidhuber