Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to present a two-person show of Austrian artist Florian Schmidt and Mexican artist Adrián S. Bará. Schmidt contributes recent monochromatic paintings, Bará shows a site-specific floor installation. Both Schmidt and Bará employ strategies of construction, assembly, and arrangement so as to emphasize a process-based mode of making that is at once structural and intuitive, systematic and loose-ended. Bará’s central installation is a horizontal structure comprised of sheetrock beds and steel armatures, upon which an array of sculptural objects are displayed—their materials culled from the artist’s immediate surroundings. In Schmidt’s paintings, a wooden frame is the support structure for an internal composition of geometric cardboard forms of varying sizes and shapes, often the recycled remains of previous works done in the same series. Refusing the conventions of grand architecture, the works in the exhibition instead champion constructions of the small and everyday, drawing connections between the repetitions of lived experience and the making of meaning.
Florian Schmidt was born in Raabs, Austria, in 1980; he lives and works in Berlin. Schmidt received his BA from Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and his MFA from University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. His works have been exhibited internationally including Kunsthalle Krems; E-Werk, Freiburg; New Galerie, Paris; Zach Feuer Gallery, New York; Figge von Rosen Galerie, Cologne; National Art Museum of China, Beijing. In addition, Schmidt is featured in the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum; in Vienna both at MUMOK, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, and MAK, Museum für angewandte Kunst / Gegenwartskunst; Collezione La Gaia and Collezione Nunzia e Vittorio Gaddi in Italy as well as Fonds M-ARCO, Marseille, among others. He has a concurrent two-person show at Fold Gallery in London. Schmidt had a recent solo show at Daniel Marzona Gallery in Berlin.
Adrián S. Bará was born in Mexico City in 1982. He lives and works in New York. His art practice encompasses video, photography, sculpture and installation. Bará’s starting point is the experience of the everyday. He discovers unexpected narratives and incorporates them organically into his works while often employing the history of filmmaking as well as found objects. Bará’s work has been shown at Aesthetics of a Collapsed System, Mexico City; A Portrait of Sovereignty at Solivagant, New York; Le Palais, Guadalajara, Mexico; Transposición, FIFI Projects Gallery, San Pedro, Mexico; Summer Fling: The Barn Show, East Hampton, NY, organized by Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York. He was recently featured in a two-person show at Site 57 Gallery in New York.