Lunch Talk - Dierk Schmidt

Upon encountering a topic, Dierk Schmidt poses three questions: "What could be the content? How am I connected to it? And how can I acess it?" From this, he develops a concept of relations and conclusions, forming a language of his very own making. This can be very literal, like the trains he painted on transparent foil when he was making a living re-painting train wagons, taking the dissatisfied comments of his colleagues and incorporating them into his painted trains. As another project shows us, Dierk Schmidt can also be very abstract. We see this in his project about the Africa conference in Berlin, where the fate of colonies and the rules they had to obey were decided. He approaches the topic through colour, patterns, and dots, incorporating the rules directly into his art. As he says himself: "It starts with the topic. Then I find a way to access an express it. It's like a clockwork, all gears interlocking and turning together."