Markus Schmitz

The drawings of Markus Schmitz bear witness to a complex and imaginative visual language of line. In a distinctive typography of his own, lines and text condense into visual nodes. Many of these drawings serve as the basis for cut-outs. Here, the artist works with the technique of paper cutting, which he has developed into a contemporary mode of expression. In a kind of two-stage process of abstraction, precise paper works emerge whose cut-out areas render the motif or narrative only as a trace, while their cast shadows extend the pictorial surface into space. Schmitz also draws on his collection of magazines as a further source. In these works, the paper cut technique, combined with the double-sided view of magazine pages, results in a new reading of advertisements and articles.

Born in 1980 in Cologne, Markus Schmitz lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2019, he has also been active as a lecturer at the Goldstein Academy.