For the past two decades photographer Jason Schmidt has pursued an ambitious project, photographing over 500 of the leading international contemporary artists at work in their studios and during the installation of their work. An exhibition at APALAZZOGALLERY, in Brescia, Italy, presents 23 of Jason Schmidt’s artist portraits dating from 2001 to 2017.
The reader could look at this catalogue of contemporary artists as a stockpile of statements. These are the artists that have come to define the art world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here are the important faces and names that infiltrate the whitewalled Chelsea galleries, that are given the expansive museum shows, or that work in the slim, radical peripheries destined to become the next Leipzig. Here are the works that serious collectors from Tokyo to Fort Worth fight to amass in their contemporary art portfolios. Such assertions may or may not be accurate or, more to the point, even relevant. In the case of the artists that Jason Schmidt has photographed over the course of the past six years, it is perhaps more useful to approach this book as a series of open-ended questions. Who are these artists and what connections do they have to one another? Caught somewhere in the process of completing a sculpture or a painting or a sound installation, where do they see their projects taking them and, by extension, us? At what point does abandonment become impossible and the pieces start to gel as a work of art?
