Now, almost two years later, we meet again to have a conversation about the gallery’s status and progress, Hannes’ previous projects and the current show; a beautiful painting exhibition by Tom Humphreys.
As for SZ’s future plans, upcoming at the gallery is a show by Olga Pedan and Charlie Froud opening on February 22nd, followed by a show by Nikolas Gambaroff.
-Tula Plumi
Hannes Schmidt
TP: Schiefe Zähne, means crooked teeth. How did you come
up with this name?
HS: Schiefe
Zähne is a comment I made in a conversation with my girlfriend, Sophie
Reinhold, trying to describe what I felt the gallery should be all about. I was
thinking of other names at the time. Sophie mentioned the comment to Lukas
Quietzsch and they convinced me I should stop making up names cause it was
already there.
SZ is not a
fixed term. For me it symbolically speaks of differences, errors and inconsistencies
as an important quality within art. I guess that’s what I care for.
Installation view, Scanners, Tom Humphreys at Schiefe Zähne
TP: Why
did you decide to open a gallery and what are your previous projects?
HS: I
studied art and also worked as an artist for quite a while. Then I started the
project Dingum, together with
Dennis Oliver Schroer. It was
was a curatorial project that happened between 2011 and 2016. My own production
slowly faded out by then, although I saw Dingum somehow as an extension of my praxis.
For most of
the time it was what is now mostly called an off-site project. At first we made
a series of shows in a modernist building in Berlin Tiergarten (Eternithaus).
It’s a spectacular space, at the time used as office for a catering company.
Dennis was friends with the owner and he agreed we could use the space on
weekends. We took photos of the office situation and then de-installed
everything in the space. Later the artist would come to install and then we had
visitors from 2 pm on Saturday until Sunday evening. After the de-installation,
we would use the pictures we had taken earlier to remember how to reconstruct
the office situation.
Later dingum
installed itself in a variety of spaces: restaurants, parking decks, gardens,
karaoke bars, rental cars. This was followed by a series of invitations of
institutions and other projects spaces and we started to travel.
This was all
pretty important for the decision to start SZ. Dingum was about the idea to
create a situation for art that raised questions on the circumstances around
the act of exhibiting and how they are an important conditional pre-set /
influences. It was also a self-empowerment move, as we decided we didn’t need
an institution or any other pre-existing, legitimating entity to create an
interesting situation.
Schiefe
Zähne now on the other hand is a
very classical format . It physically is a space like any other, trying
to provide good conditions to present art without looking aseptic. I guess I
like these limitations now after
this long excursion of various circumstances. At the moment I look at it
as an experiment with very specific conditions.
I’m using
the gallery format because I can’t ignore the fact that this is all taking
place in an economic reality and I think there should be a value system to the
work done. So far everything I ever did in art was
cross-financed by the artists and me, I never really got funding for any of the
curatorial projects. To make a permanent space, you can hardly trust on funding
and if you, on the other hand, approach the market you seem to loose the
credibility for it.
I have to
see where this goes. I’m not bending the term of art towards a market
functionality. Therefore I don’t see why these two perspectives of selling work
and getting funded should be in this dualistic state of opposition in the case
of spaces like SZ.
Installation view, Scanners, Tom Humphreys at Schiefe Zähne
TP: How
do you choose the artists you show?
HS: I guess all artists I worked with
have an ability to reflect the controversies of their own production in their
work. We also have a shared sense for the context this production takes place
in. In many cases the relationship to the artists is based on intense conversations
that were unbearable if we
didn’t share a sense of humour.
TP: How
do you engage with the art market? Are you planning to go deeper into the
gallery business or do you prefer to keep an independent profile?
HS: I will again
apply for the Berlin project space funding. At the same time I
got invited by a number of
fairs, but the fees are just too high to take the risk for spaces like SZ.
I replied to
some and suggested to work with them on commission. Since young galleries seem
to be an important quality for fairs the deal could be this: we’ll pay them in
case of sales, this would guarantee them our participation on the base of a
shared risk. If the fairs don’t want to take the risk by themselves they could
share this with blue chip and other bigger galleries who profit the most from
the fairs’ ‘young and cutting edge’ program.
Installation view, Scanners, Tom Humphreys at Schiefe Zähne
TP: How
does the gallery contribute to the local art scene?
HS: Well,
serious independent programming in a physical space where people can come see
it. I think SZ is structurally
interesting by keeping up a program against lots of odds. I care for bringing
people to Berlin that haven’t shown here. At the same time I think there’s
really good positions of people who live here and are really engaged with the
city. So it brings new perspectives into the city and at the same time it gives
larger visibility to positions from the Berlin scene.
TP: What
has been the feedback so far and what are your goals for 2019?
HS: Feedback so
far has been really good! I think lots of people have an interest in these kind
of structures, I’m thankful for all the attention we get from various sides.
Berlin has a huge scene and it’s really not a given thing to have an audience,
the press, blogs and art fairs respond to this.
The upcoming
show is Olga Pedan and Charlie Froud, opening on February 22nd. Really
looking forward to this.
This year I
want to figure out a way how to make SZ economically self-sufficient, either
through funding or sales or both, so the artist and me don’t have to cross-finance
everything.
TP:
Currently on view is the show Scanners by Tom Humphreys. It comprises a series
of paintings depicting hands “framing a section of a larger visual continuity”
as you write in the press release. Can you tell us a bit about the artist and
the show?
HS: Tom is a
painter who lives in Essex and London, where he used to run a space called
‚Flaca‘. He brought a lot positions from the scene in Germany at the time to
England. This already is important to me in a way, since I showed many people
at SZ that are involved in exhibition making or ran project spaces. (Lukas
Quietzsch and Philipp Simon (Liszt), Helene Fauquet (Various Projects),
Shoshiro Matsubara (XYZ Collective), Lucie Stahl (Pro Choice), Henning Bohl
(Various Projects).
Since about
a year, Tom works more classically with canvas formats while before he has worked
on many different materials. Very known are his works on ceramics including
photo transfer prints. The paintings at SZ show hands making a crop-move, as if
they were trying to find the framing for a photograph. Simultaneously the hand
seems to reproduce the paintings edges in the way they set the borders of the
paints match field. This is the framework for what then becomes a very playful
and diverse interpretation of the motive and use of color and styles.
TP: What
are your thoughts on Painting? Considering that you have shown quite a few
paintings; works by Tom Humphrey, Soshiro Matsubara, Sophie Reinhold, Anders
Johansson, Ryan Siegan Smith, Nico Ihlein and Lukas Quietzsch.
HS: The fact I
showed a series of painters may be caused by increasing interest during the
process. I didn’t plan to do so.
I think
painting works in a very specific relation to its producer. It feel it’s like a language with a vocabular, grammar and
everything, supposedly comparable due to the reduced elements used and its
flatness. But then it’s also not at all comparable because there’s so many ways
of using it. Just like a language and it’s relation to the speaker. You shouldn't take it all too literal.
Scanners by TOM HUMPHREYS is on view until January 19th 2019
Schiefe Zähne
Schliemannstr. 37 10437 Berlin
info@schiefe-zaehne.com
open by appointment: +49 (0) 179 1204102