The Sert Gallery at Harvard University To Show "Pavel Schmidt: Franz Kafka"

Written by Morgan Clarkson Saturday, 27 August 2011 23:30

Cambridge, MA.- The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Departments of Comparative Literature and German at Harvard University are pleased to present "Pavel Schmidt: Franz Kafka—Verschrieben & Verzeichnet", on view in the Sert Gallery from September 13th through October 16th. An opening panel discussion and reception will take place on Thursday, September 29th at 6 pm. The Kafka cycle presented here consists of forty-nine sketches created over the past four years by Pavel Schmidt, Swiss painter, illustrator, and installation artist. The title of each drawing is the name of a character from one of Kafka’s narratives or someone the author personally knew. Schmidt juxtaposes each drawing with a fragment from Kafka’s previously unpublished writings, which are here presented in the German with English translations.

The texts are not meant to explain the images, nor the images the texts. There is nevertheless a correlation between the works of the two artists: for Kafka, writing was an inner necessity. He created his characters by wrestling with, rejecting, molding, and inventing language — a creative process that Pavel Schmidt deliberately explores in his work. The cycle has been previously exhibited in Zürich, Berlin, Prague, New York, and Princeton. Pavel Schmidt was born in 1956 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. He started out studying chemistry at the University of Bern before training in Fine Arts in Munich, where he worked with Daniel Spoerri. From this encounter, he retained a sharpened sense of life’s drama and of his own experience as a work of art. He has shown extensively in Europe, the US, and Korea, and has produced many books as painter, illustrator and installation artist. He has organized actions in extraordinarily diverse sites, using explosives, fireworks, and smoke-bombs, destroying and rebuilding to music cultural archetypes like gods and goddesses, garden dwarves and hoses. He enjoys breaking and blowing up everything in order to apply his bandages and crutches, thereby reconstructing his own world, as a destructive and reparative nurse-artist. The present exhibition ("Franz Kafka: Verschrieben & Verzeichnet") offers a startling interpretation of Franz Kafka's work. In this cycle of 49 color sketches, Schmidt works with original fragments from Kafka's bequest and causes these cryptic, unpublished texts to collide with provocative images.

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, completed in 1963, is the only building on the North American continent designed by the famous Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. Despite the controversy over the wisdom of placing a building of such modern design in a traditional location, Le Corbusier felt that a building devoted to the visual arts must be an experience of freedom and unbound creativity. A traditional building for the visual arts would have been a contradiction. The Carpenter Center represents Corbusier's attempt to create a "synthesis of the arts," the union of architecture with painting, sculpture, through his innovative design. The building was completed in 1963, made possible by a gift from Alfred St. Vrain Carpenter, and the intent to house the artistic entities of Harvard College under one roof came to fruition in 1968 as the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. The five levels of the building function as open and flexible working spaces for painting, drawing, and sculpture, and the ramp through the heart of the building encourages public circulation and provides views into the studios, making the creative process visible through the building design. The Sert Gallery, at the top of the ramp, features the work of contemporary artists, and the main gallery at street level hosts a variety of exhibitions supporting the curriculum of the Department. The Carpenter Center is also home to the Harvard Film Archive, which brings to the public a unique program of classic, rare and experimental films. Visit the center's website at ... http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/ccva.html

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