Peter Schmiedel (1929 – 1997)

Peter Schmiedel (1929 – 1997), was a German abstract artist mostly working in oils. He was born in Dresden in 1929 and he studied at the Berlin School of Fine Arts from 1949-55 as a student of Hans Uhlmann. He was awarded several travel grants and eventually received a professorship in the visual communication department, where he taught painting and graphics. He retired to Hall in Upper Styria where he continued to work as an artist until his death in 1997.

After his retirement, he lived as a freelance artist in Hall near Admont in, where he died in 1997. Schmiedel exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions in Germany throughout the second half of the 20th Century, and there have been two solo retrospective exhibitions of his work:

2014 Gallery Irene Lehr, Berlin
2017 Kopriva Gallery, Krems

Eberhard Roters (1929 – 1994), founding director of the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art said of Schmiedel’s work (translated):

“Schmiedel is always concerned with grasping the weightlessness of color as a pure phenomenon, and where he can do it perfectly, his happiest moments have become a picture.”

Schmiedel was a proponent of Goethe’s theory of colours “Zur Farbenlehre” and mainly used the primary colours of blue, yellow and red in his oil and watercolour paintings and woodcuts. In his black and white works, he expressed that he tried to continue to implement “the image-creating energies of the form derived from color” as in his colored works.

The lithographs below are from a pamphlet/art catalogue of his work from 1960. This included four lithographs; three in black and white, and one colour lithograph, signed and numbered in pencil.