Being a person
Iris Schomaker, 2014
Vilaseco Hauser shows a selection of the latest works by the German artist Iris Schomaker, pieces in small and large format that are exhibited without a frame, directly on the walls, in order to integrate them as much as possible into the space beyond established limits. Without the frame her pieces demand space, wanting to be seen in and out of it.
The exhibition is entitled “Being a person”, in reference to the female or male figures with schematic and angular lines that continue to populate Schomaker’s works, halfway between the abstract and the figurative. Arranged on white backgrounds, they never offer specific features and tell us about the artist’s aspirations to represent essences: individuals in empty spaces, landscapes and heads covered with scarves are extraordinarily refined and also allude to a certain fusion between the nature, the human and the animal.
Individual features are lost and reduced to geometry without any ornament; these pieces convey both calm and aseptic distance.
For the German artist, the creative process of each painting is fundamental, even more so than the theme represented: she tries to explore the possibilities of the medium to the fullest. She usually draws the contours of her figures in charcoal, seeking to print dynamism to the lines and leaving the path traveled until reaching the final forms in the eye of the viewer. She mixes those strokes with paint: she uses thin layers of watercolor, gouache or acrylic and covers them with varnish. If she has applied too much paint, she sands or cleans to expose her figures throughout the process, in which columns of water and pigment intentionally fall through the image to emphasize the unfinished aspect of her works. The tones that she most commonly uses are black and white, but she doesn’t reject blues and greens to enrich the result.