Franziska Schemel

Franziska Schemel was born in Frankfurt am Main and studied painting at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design  under Prof. Erich Mansen from 1984 to 1990. She has lived and worked as a freelance artist in Karlsruhe since then.

The artist has been awarded various art prizes and scholarships (Waiblingen, Freudenstadt, Barcelona, Salem and New York). She is regularly represented in international galleries and at art fairs, and her works can be found in numerous public and private collections.

Color, light and space as a synthesis – this is how the fascination underlying Franziska Schemel’s artistic work could be described. This goes far beyond “breaking out of darkness into brightness”: “For me, a picture has to ‘resonate’,” Schemel states.

In her pictorial objects, Franziska Schemel deals with living in urban space. She describes the paths within our everyday environment and extends them, adding a possible perspective via a photo, into the seemingly infinite without being aimless. The movements of everyday life are recognizable and perceptible in her works and the inner and outer areas, the daily comings and goings, are given a clear definition.

Shemel repeatedly deals with spaces of transition, with threshold experiences, through architecture in urban public space, which is only entered in order to be left again (corridors, underpasses, subway stations, stairs): these are animated spaces and yet not living spaces – they are essential and at the same time empty, devoid of anything but restlessness,  not abode in their own right.

The artist assembles her own small-format photographs into her large-format panels, often depicting people at the intersection. Accordingly, a window opens through which Schemel draws the viewers‘ attention to the imaginary-illusionary within the real, reveals the artificiality of urban living environments, with all their sociological and psychological implications.

There is a quiet, yet relentlessly concise, openness and delicacy about Franziska Schemel’s oeuvre, which sometimes even appears to be a downright spiritual quality, wich is primarily due to the technical sophistication of her visual idiom:

The pictorial composition and coloring are greatly reduced, and the mixture of acrylic paint with pigments, stone powder and sand creates a rough and muted surface structure, which – in contrast to the clear formal language of the architecturally inspired main motifs (stairs, corridors, …) creates an unexpected tension – indeed a veritable field of energy.

This two-dimensionality and simultaneous evocation of space opens up the possibility for viewers to engage in the conscious experience and reflection of threshold, liminal and transitorial experiences, their conditions, possibilities and limits, on various levels