Nicole Schmölzer works with oil paint and ink. Her intuitive, abstract imagery emerges out of the dynamics and the organic flow of the fluid paint, in which gravitation, sedimentation and other process-oriented approaches are in play. The distinctive characteristics of her work lie in a play and counter-play of intention and chance, suggestive rhythms, as well as of an attractive-repulsive aspect as they are revealed in the creative process and its becoming.

Her paintings grow and develop rhythmically over time, giving visible form to natural phenomena as known in our cyclical, suggestive and paradoxical reality: (an extract of her new publication: Imbuing, Modo Publisher.

“With painting I am pursuing an approach to the real which is not necessarily visible or depicted as such. I have followed the motivation for abstraction, the inner impulse, a life rhythm, a movement or an energy which underlie the tides of life and human growth. To translate this into painting, to represent and incorporate the flowing, to catch the subtle movement of the changeable, to set one’s sights on in-between state (describable through an observation from the inside); the stillness in the flow—all this becomes the content of a painting for me as a painter and observer.”

Nicole Schmölzer is from Switzerland and has been painting since 1995 in her studios in Basel and New York. She was introduced to painting at an early age through the art school Martenot (1975-88) and completed pedagogical studies at Martenot in Paris in 1988-89. Since 1995 her work has been regularly shown at different galleries and exhibition spaces in Europe, the United States and Japan. She has received grants for artist residencies from the Art OMI Foundation NY, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Montalvo Arts Center in California and the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation in Maine.

She has also worked with site-specific art and architecture realizations (Basel, 2014), as well as with projection-performance-projects involving animated painting (experimental video).

For more information on the interdisciplinary project mentioned in the interview, click here.

Imbuing 39x31.5 inches, oil, ink, linen.

Staining, 70x60 inches, oil, ink, linen.

Studio, 2020