Fernperspektiven: Albrecht Schnider

Over the past 20 years, Albrecht Schnider has repeatedly created small format landscapes, forming an isolated group in the artist’s oeuvre, characterized by the subject of mountain and hilly scenery, panorama-like horizontal format, and the use of oil paints, in contrast to the lacquer paints he usually uses in his work.

Schnider’s landscapes emerge in his Berlin studio, not as a depiction of an actually seen landscape, but as pure artificiality, emerging in a highly controlled and precise act of painting and through a minutely planned visual construction by way of puzzle-like color fields consisting of various shades of green, yellow, and brown.

Seemingly a typologized scene, and despite the dematerialization and emptiness evoked, the images touch the beholder, recall memories and perhaps longings. “Albrecht Schnider turns the perspective around—the distant does not lie inside the painting, it takes place in a mirror, it takes place reflexively, in retroactive beholding.
The beholder standing before the small format image is the point far in the distance. In the miniature web of expanding and narrowing surfaces, he imagines a broad scope of heights and surfaces—the distant here lies in his gaze, in remembering… In this moment of perception images of memory surface, something that we want to understand with the lyrical word landscape—a fleeting transparency in deep surfaces.” (Birgit Szepanksi)

Albrecht Schnider develops a new landscape from the last finished, and in this way over the years smaller and larger groups have emerged. While each landscape is in itself closed and autonomous, according to the artist the series reveals very personal things, that is, his doubt and incapacity to create something absolute. “The moment of repetition has personally something to do with me too. I have the tendency to repeating episodes in my life, almost to the point of monotony. Anything that interrupts this monotony is ultimately a horror to me. To that extent, these landscape series could even be seen as self-portraits.”