Portrait English by Dieter Schmidt-Brandt

Born in Monheim [FRG] in 1951, Dieter Schmidt-Brandt worked as a Management Consultant and is a selftaught artist.

In 1986, he created his first representational charcoal drawings, and in December 1988, his first oil on canvas.

Three other works followed in short succession. The completed initial series of paintings served,

at the same time, as an introduction to the development of other painting sequences.

Although the concrete is abstracted or creatively transformes in an associative manner, as is the case

with headless, chicago, or "explosion" [in the last work, Schmidt-Brandt uses a pyramidal box to trigger the transformation

into a volcano], these early paintings reveal important characteristics of the artist's creativity as a painter.

The painting process itself is assigned an important expressive value. At the same time, the color surfaces,

with their representational content diminishing from painting to painting, exhibit increasingly intense effects

of their own, as manisfested in the work entitled ebbe / flut [low tide / high tide].

In "dreams to remember" and jump, the powerful color qualities and liberating effects of the intense processes

involved in creating a painting lead to syntheses that become independent images of their own.

The application of paint, a physical process of transforming both emotional and intellectual experiences

into images, is referred to as a creative manifestation.

With the above mentioned two paintings used as an example, the evidence of such painting approaches

becomes evident. In the blue-dominated color/space creation dreams to remember, the traces of writing

in a different color produce vibrating effects that illustrate the psychological and space-defining properties of color.

The relief-type application in the white painting jump produces a modulation of light and, consequently,

a movement that culminates in concentrating energy in a few color gestures.

At the same time, those colors create the contrast to the immaterial quality of white

in conveying a sense of light and transcendence.

In the New York I/II and sunset & darkness, paint is applied with a spatula so as to achieve a rhythmic

constraint by means of the pasty texture of the paint. The technique achieves a meditative effect,

intended to make the viewer conscious of the qualities of the colors themselves as they appear in the individual paintings

as well as in their relationship to subsequent paintings in the series. This is exemplified in the grouping

blue avenue, NewYork I/II, where an iridescent multitude of colors and a monochromatic,

meditative pasty background are contrasted.

In sunset & darkness, the color experience is expanded by means of the tension between absorbingly

deep dark tones and the intense, aggresively warm vividness of red.

Frame attempts to counteract the inherent dynamics of the colors with a rhythmic organization of space.

This remains the only attempt to do so, since it is precisely the theme of movement in color and in the

painting process that fascinates Dieter Schmidt-Brandt in his artistic work.

The paintings Alison on Dominick St. and 21.West 87 again reflect this intention.

Monochromatic painting also leads into philosophic fringe areas in which colors, as components of light,

point to transcendence through their diminished substance.

Inaugural address by Mrs. Dr. Marianne Ebersold on the occasion of the first exhibition of paintings in 1990, Gallery b2, Solingen

1 9 8 8	Start with first oil on canvas and other colour-/material- mixes

1 9 9 0	Single-Exhibition with 14 oil-paintings, Gallery b2, Solingen [FRG]

1 9 9 0	International Group-Exhibition "SERIGRAPHS", Gallery b2, Solingen [FRG]

1 9 9 1	Single-Exhibition with 20 oil-paintings, Gallery Schmitz-Weiss, Essen [FRG]

1 9 9 2	European Special Exhibition "SCREEN PRINTING SERIGRAPHS", FESPA International Tradeshow, Amsterdam [NL]

1 9 9 2	Art Multiple, Düsseldorf, 1. International Artfair for Printed Graphics and Multiples [FRG]

1 9 9 3	Single-Exhibition with 16 oil-paintings, Lifecycle presentation "Emotional Alteration", ARTAX Gallery, Düsseldorf [FRG]

	No further exhibitions due to lack of time and business engagement