Under the title “Downtown” Haus am Waldsee presents the artist Erik Schmidt in his first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin.

Erik Schmidt‘s work deals with the observation of symbolic processes within various social subsystems. Clichés, stereotypes, codes, rituals, norms, patterns, conventions or roles are of particular interest to him. He studies and experiences them in the context of various, socially marginalised groups, such as the occupy-movement, which Schmidt dissolves in a painterly manner from photographs into an infinite field of colour and forms. He sees workers on plantations in Israel as living under the same exotic conditions as tropical plants in the botanical gardens of countries outside the tropics. Not least, all the works speak of the artist himself, who still, at the dawn of the 21^st century, considers himself to fulfil one of society‘s exceptional roles.

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