Still
Serving
13.8.26 - 19.9.26
Despite being a painter, Clara Schmidt is one of the least painterly painters I know. I mean this in the nicest possible sense. She paints with unnerving ease, but I know her to be impatient, and relatively uninterested in the kind of prolonged, inward-looking devotion to painting that so often comes with the territory. Put another way: she does not seem particularly preoccupied with the fact that she is painting. No waiting around for the paint to reveal the mysteries of paint. She has things to do.
In Still Serving, those things include painting other people’s Vinted listings. In doing so Clara Schmidt stays remarkably faithful to her source material, and perhaps more importantly to the strange decisions of the people who made it.
A Givenchy scarf has been carefully laid flat across a public bench and photographed at an angle, as if the seller also happens to fancy themselves an architectural photographer. A necktie is arranged into a neat N on a parquet floor, a potted plant placed behind it for some sort of moral support. A pair of glasses rests across the buttocks of a small plaster figurine clutching a vase. Two white pumps on a piece of baby pink fur, and an entirely ordinary umbrella - who even sells an umbrella? - has been opened indoors and is held there by an otherwise invisible model, betrayed only by the legs sticking out beneath it. Then there is Chanel: brooch, box, packaging, Galeries Lafayette receipt, all reverently arranged tone-on-tone like evidence in a very chic investigation. Vinted sellers, it turns out, will do almost anything except simply photograph the thing.
You could - almost too easily - get Freudian about it. These peculiar alliances between objects practically offer themselves up as tiny trapdoors into the unconscious, and who doesn’t enjoy waiting to see what might leak out somewhere between glasses and buttocks. (I can’t stop thinking of Alexa Chung lying on Bella Freud’s couch in Fashion Neurosis to discuss a Miu Miu outfit and arriving, with remarkable efficiency, at the trauma of the 2004 tsunami). There is, undeniably, something Surrealist about the whole affair (they did love a good display): accidental assemblages, mannequins and surrogate bodies, erotic little collisions of shoes and fur; Meret Oppenheim does not seem exactly far away..
But Schmidt is neither a psychoanalyst nor a high school bully. She is exceptionally loyal - both as an artist and, I happen to know, as a friend. There is some of that loyalty present in the way she leaves these odd decisions exactly as she found them. She refuses the cheap pleasure of making anyone look stupid for having tried. It is a vulnerable thing, after all, to show someone what you think looks good, and more vulnerable still to let them see what it took to make it look that way: the fur laid down just so, the plant brought in for the occasion, someone persuaded to sit behind the umbrella.
Schmidt’s sculptures take a similar risk. They could easily have been slick, seamless things, their practicalities engineered discreetly out of sight. Instead, they take the considerably riskier route of looking almost naively homemade. Mannequin hands hold up a night sky; a lamp makes a sign turn; things are propped up because things need propping up. She lets her own sculptures risk the same thing as the people in her paintings: looking like they tried.
Earlier this summer, Clara and I were at a bar when we somehow ended up talking about Claes Oldenburg’s London Knees: two latex knees, the colour of old marble, standing upright like two little skyscrapers. They are ever so slightly knock-kneed, and we decided immediately that they are ofc. from a teenage girl. It takes almost nothing - that tiny inward turn, the leg’s small apology for having a body attached to it - to make something monumental suddenly seem shy. We both found them terribly moving.
Something of that same contradiction moves me in Clara Schmidts work: the sophistication never quite does away with the vulnerability. I have known Clara since we were sixteen, which means I have also known her across twelve years of us getting better dressed. I like that the work has got better dressed too, but I love that it has never quite felt the need to straighten its knees.
Text by Laura Fuglsang
Photo: Kevin Josias