Allan Schmidt Biography
Allan Schmidt (1923 - 1989) was a Danish-born artist who alternately used painting, ceramic sculpture and collage. He began as a naturalist with paintings of figures and landscapes, but in the years following the Second World War he came into contact with French and Danish artists working with Concrete Painting. In the late 1940s he left the recognizable motifs and began working on constructive compositions. To make the images dynamic, he often used lines, consisting of three or four strong black lines next to each other, crossing diagonally across the image, cracking and forming a new figure. At the same time, he began to make narrow sculptures, fragile iron structures or cubic concrete blocks that move and together form a whole. In the mid-1950s, the images, often in tall, narrow formats, began to appear Cubist due to the overlapping of planes. The colors became dark, saturated blues and greens, warm reds and oranges. At the end of the 1950s his forms become freer, rounder and gather around a central vertical axis or around the center of the image, from which they wrap towards the edge of the frame. When Schmidt received the commission for the large relief for the Central Library of Horsens, he chose a new material, stoneware. He had not previously worked with ceramics, but thus began a collaboration with the Kähler ceramics workshop. Since then, he has made several large decorations in this material. The expressive form of this production is still non-figurative; an organic, expressionist language, inspired by the forms of nature, most often fragments of the human body.
