ERICH SCHMID

Erich SCHMID's pictorial universe is distinguished by its expressionism and density: blurred and indistinct cities, deserted streets and squares where human solitude reigns, compact processions of figures huddled together in a poignant sense of insecurity.
His complex and exceptionally emotionally intense work is directly derived from an experience marked by exile and suffering.

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1908, he grew up in the intellectual ferment of the early 20th century. Between 1925 and 1930, he studied psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna. Afterwards, he attended the Kunstgewerbeschule (the school of arts and crafts) in Vienna and the Reimann School of Art and Design, a private art school, in Berlin.

The annexation of Austria by Germany forced him to flee Nazism to Belgium and then France. Arrested and imprisoned in a camp, Erich continued to draw and paint, transforming his imprisonment into an act of creative resistance. He learned that his parents and brother had been murdered at Auschwitz.

At the end of 1945, Erich returned to Paris, settling into an attic room that would become his studio. He exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1949. His creations are abstract and expressive. He considered that “his painting must be a reparative act, that is, a reconstruction in pictorial form of a denied, or rather anesthetized, reality, deprived of its emotional impact.”

Erich reconciled abstraction and figuration, merging them in a personal synthesis that would give rise to his most accomplished works. Schmid pursued the artistic analysis of the urban cityscape, in which he found a projection surface for expressive mental states.

Even though he belongs to the great unrecognized Austrian exiled artists, Erich Schmid will be recognized in France by Cottavoz or Fusaro as one of the great masters of 20th-century painting. Although he lived in poverty, he exhibited in museums and his works are part of collections in Europe, Canada, and Japan.