Lindinger + Schmid | Außer Konkurrenz | Galerie Tammen | 09.02.-06.04.2024

until 06.04 | #4150ARTatBerlin | Galerie Tammen shows from 9. February 2024 the extraordinary exhibition project Außer Konkurrenz (Out of Competition) with the artist duo LINDINGER + SCHMID. The works of the artist duo are being presented for the first time.

Gabriele Lindinger and Karlheinz Schmid, widely known as Lindinger + Schmid, have been travelling the art world together for over three decades. The duo has not only published books and the KUNSTZEITUNG, but has also realised countless exhibitions and projects. Art mediation in close co-operation with painters, sculptors and photographers such as Jochen Gerz, Jürgen Klauke and Franz Erhard Walther as well as with interdisciplinary artists including Hermann Nitsch and Christoph Schlingensief. Lindinger + Schmid have also been an artist couple since 2007.

Gabriele Lindinger and Karlheinz Schmid have focussed on topics related to their journalistic and publishing work. It is therefore always a question of critically analysing the practices and developments in the context of an industry that has grown in quantity in recent decades, but has in part declined in quality.

The gallery presents the artist duo for the first time with paintings from three decades. The painter duo, who have been working in secret until now, will be showing their art business art in groups of works such as “Ranking”, “Label”, “Diptychs” and “classic to go”. In autumn 2023, LINDINGER + SCHMID very surprisingly discontinued their decades-long exceptional publishing and journalistic position on the German art market with the KUNSTZEITUNG and the industry service “Informationsdienst KUNST”, among others – this is well known. It is not known that Gabriele Lindinger learnt a lot from Emilio Vedova and that Karlheinz Schmid studied painting and art theory with Raimer Jochims at the Städelschule and screen printing with Thomas Bayrle. After their intensive publishing work, they spent many evenings together in the studio – far away from any kind of publicity. Creating artistic work in the context of identity-forming art is her constant concern.

PRADA, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas, 160 x 160 cm

Interview: Lindinger + Schmid
Kunstbetriebskünstler (Art business artist=

Gallery owner Werner Tammen in conversation with Gabriele Lindinger and Karlheinz Schmid

Question: You have never exhibited your own works together before; works from three decades are now on show for the first time at the Tammen Gallery in Berlin. Under the title “Out of Competition”, Lindinger + Schmid, the painter duo who have been working in secret until now, are showing their art business art. Why only now?
now?

Gabriele Lindinger: As long as we were active as publishers and journalists, whether thanks to our book production or the KUNSTZEITUNG and the industry newsletter Informationsdienst KUNST, we didn’t want to go public with our pictures. Just old school: Avoiding conflicts of interest.

Question: Before you two became a couple in 1990, both privately and in terms of art, you were already active as artists, albeit in different disciplines. How did you come together artistically?

Karlheinz Schmid: Gabriele did indeed learn a lot from Emilio Vedova, I had studied painting and art theory with Raimer Jochims in Frankfurt. So our joint works combine an informal, expressive style with a conceptual, serial orientation. Admittedly against the background of our decades of observing and critically analysing the art world.

Question: So can it be said that Lindinger + Schmid, the new double pack entering the art market, essentially stands for art business art?

Karlheinz Schmid: Yes, that’s right. There’s no doubt that the intimate insights into the international art world that were made possible by our former profession have led to a unique wealth of information. It’s an asset that we can now continue to use critically – through painting, photography, drawing, with groups of works such as “Ranking”, “Label” and “classic to go”.

Gabriele Lindinger: And please don’t forget the diptychs, those two-part paintings that seem to come from a single mould and were created in a tight, incredibly deep act of painting. Ultimately, perhaps also a statement against the rampant loneliness in the studio that many colleagues suffer from.

Question: Speaking of isolation. The fact that you, Karlheinz Schmid, once closed your studio about two years after graduating and switched to journalism is said to have had something to do with your sociability and dissatisfaction as a solo artist working primarily as a draughtsman. Correct?

Karlheinz Schmid: I also realised that although a young artist has a visual craft – I had also studied screen printing with Thomas Bayrle at the Städelschule – and can contribute knowledge of art history and theory, art has to be about the whole. the existential dimension. It has to do with living life.

Question: Can you explain that in more detail?

Gabriele Lindinger: It’s not just about very personal experiences, for example strokes of fate, challenges for the individual or for a duo, such as a heart transplant, but also about categorising global and sectoral political developments over a long period of time. Our aim is to create artistic work in the context of identity-forming art.

Question: As a publisher and journalist, you have long been critical of the art business on the axis of truth and commodity, and have had to put up with all kinds of hostility as a result. Will you maintain this uncomfortable attitude, do you also want to provoke in art?

Karlheinz Schmid: Provocation for the sake of provocation is not the aim. Of course, where it is necessary to put a finger in the wound or diagnose weaknesses and create transparency, we will continue to react incorruptibly. This does not exclude the possibility that Lindinger + Schmid’s pictures will always contain a pinch of humour.

Gabriele Lindinger

She was born in Osterhofen, Bavaria, in 1952. Her father, a tax consultant, always photographed landscapes in his spare time. Although she herself studied business administration, she soon became interested in art. The desire to give her artistic passion and self-taught painting a professional basis led her to one of her most important teachers, Emilio Vedova. Originally focussing on portraits and landscapes, she developed a non-representational pictorial language through abstraction, gradually opening up to the subject again. His artistic collaboration with Karlheinz Schmid, intensified from 2007 onwards, resulted in works that can be categorised as art business art.

Karlheinz Schmid

Born in Hanau in 1953, he studied painting and art theory for ten semesters under Raimer Jochims at the Städelschule, the State Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt, before working as a freelance artist and then switching to art criticism. Schmid wrote for specialist magazines such as “Artis”, “Kunstforum”, “Kunstwerk”, “Noema” and “Wolkenkratzer”, and he worked as an editor for “Art” for five years before a phase of freelance authorship for “FAZ”, “Spiegel”, “Stern”, “Zeit” and many other publications as well as radio and television followed in the mid-1980s. He was also active in teaching, as a lecturer at the University of Lüneburg and as a professor at the Academy in Nuremberg. After founding the publishing house with Gabriele Lindinger, he gradually returned to his artistic activities as well, as a couple with his partner.