post-title portfolio-title René Schoemakers no no

René Schoemakers

PROLOGUE | PERSONAL René, where do we meet? We meet in Kiel, on the western edge of the town, in my house. Surrounded by family houses and greenery. Behind the house is a large garden, behind that a small wood. If you look out of the window, you only see green, also because there is a giant sequoia tree in the garden. If you see the house and don’t enter the studio or the paintings storage room, you don’t suspect that an artist lives and works in the house. A journalist once wrote about our flat as “wonderfully unpretentious”. He meant “boring”, of course. Maybe we are sitting at your favorite place? We sit in the studio, my workplace. As I am working most of the time and no one forces me to do so, one could call it my favourite place, so to speak.Where do you come from, where were you born when? I was born in 1972 in Kleve on the Lower Rhine. I lived there until 1992 and also had my first exhibitions there starting in 1987. Kleve is perhaps better known in the art world as the place where Joseph Beuys grew up. How and where do you currently live and work? I have lived in Kiel since 1992, first with my wife, with whom I have been together for 34 years, and then with more and more children, in the end five. My studio is in the basement of the house, after my time at art school I always had my studio in the house where I also lived. Which stations and people have shaped you? As the person involved, it is probably not possible to give completely objective information about this, especially since such processes primarily take place behind the back of the passive protagonist. Presumably – as far as I can reconstruct it myself – my origins shaped me first. I am a Catholic working-class child from the countryside. That is probably the reason why the art world, the art business as a whole, are and remain habitually strange to me. Art is a bourgeois institution, and I am a peasant. Furthermore, my relationship with my wife must have had an influence on me, because when you live together for 34 years and have done a lot of …

Read the complete interview with René Schoemakers on DEEDS.WORLD

 

Image caption: René Schoemakers, Portrait, Baltic Sea near Kiel, 2021, Photo: © Tom Fechtner

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