Bastienne Schmidt

The series Colored Grids consists of a typology that is pigmented, sewn, pleated and stretched over canvas.

Malleable fabrics have been part of my practice for a long time going back to my childhood in Greece, where fabrics were often recycled.

I see painted fabrics functioning as a skin or a kind of garment.

In the first series White Grids, the process consisted of painting and markings in monochromatic shades of whites on raw cotton duck canvas, recalling the shades of whites of Agnes Martin. With the Colored Grids series, I maintain through sewing the configuration of a grid, but I let slowly enter some colors onto the canvas. The first color that entered this process was primary cyan blue, as an ode to the horizon line of the Greek islands.

Instead of working with a deductive process, I am working with an additive process, introducing primary color fields that are in part painted with pigments and in part sewn with vintage fabrics.

The most recent evolution of my process is a continuation of the search of colors and patterns, the yin and yang of the manmade and of industrial patterns. The shapes are nestled upon muslin fabric, that I pigment, fold, paint and sew into shapes, that are still geometric but show some rounded corners.

They accentuate, like Japanese wood cut prints and the hand cut silhouette shapes by Matisse the interplay

between foreground and background. The hand pigmented and folded fabric patterns allude to botanical and organic materials.

A monograph entitled Grids and Threads was published by Jovis in 2018 with a text by Jacoba Urist and an interview with Parrish Art Museum director Terrie Sultan. Grids and Threads was exhibited in 2018 at the Parrish Art Museum and the Watermill Center in Water Mill, New York.

Colored Grids was exhibited in 2019 at the Parrish Art Museum, part of the Artists Choose Artists series.