Marianna Schmidt: Mixed Media Works 1963 - 2002
(July 13 - September 15, 2007)

Marianna Schmidt, who lived and worked in Vancouver, BC from the mid-1950s to 2005, was an accomplished and distinctive modernist. Her creative output was extensive and exaustive; in essence, a life's work that reveals a wide diversity of styles and techniques.

Born in Hungary in 1918, Marianna Schmidt fled her country as a refugee in 1944, and spent years in displaced person's camps in Austria, Germany and England before immigrating to Canada. Not surprisingly, the most persistent feelings in her art are those of loneliness, alienation and dislocation.

Marianna Schmidt: Mixed Media Works includes over 50 work from various sources including extensive holdings from the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent, Belgium, the Estate of Marianna Schmidt and private collections. It is co-curated by Vancouver based writer, critic and curator Robin Laurence and Ellen van Eijnsbergen, Visual Arts Program Manager for the Evergreen Cultural Centre.

Referencing images in the exhibition, Laurence follows the fluctuation of Schmidt’s imagery between expressionistic figuration and more classical forms of abstraction. Laurence argues that the artist struggled to find a way of ordering and controlling the intuitive impulses that flowed through her pen, pencil or paintbrush.  In the last decade of Schmidt’s career, Laurence writes, long-standing feelings of homelessness expressed themselves through imagery that conflated figure, map and landscape. 

The exhibition at the Evergreen Cultural Centre is part of a larger retrospective taking place at two other galleries in the lower mainland -- Burnaby Art Gallery and SFU Teck Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful 80 page book on the artist. In addition a panel discussion on her life and work takes place at SFU Downtown Campus.