Galerie de Buci is dedicating its new exhibition to the singular work of Masha Schmidt, with Partitas, a condensed retrospective of fifteen years of artistic research focusing on the dialogue between music and image. Far from a simple formal demonstration, the exhibition stands out as a sensitive exploration of the connections between pictorial text, musical score, and exhibition space.
Masha Schmidt's approach is part of a transdisciplinary tradition, where the boundaries between the arts become porous, permeable to emotion and intuition. True to the spirit of Galerie de Buci, which seeks to be a place of dialogue between media, cultures, and aesthetics, the artist invests the space like a score itself: a free and shifting field of interpretation.
Masha Schmidt aptly cultivates an elusive artist's posture. She belongs to no movement, follows no well-trodden path. On the contrary, she allows herself multiplicity: drawing, painting, installation, scenography, and even cinema all feed into a work in perpetual motion.
Her approach does not aim to illustrate, but to conjure up worlds: she composes, in the musical sense of the term, spaces of resonance. One of her statements, written at the heart of the installation, sums up her thinking:
"Painting only crosses the boundaries of format. Inevitably, it continues; it cannot stop. The canvas, a piece of paper, any medium is but a window through which we glimpse the continuous flow of life."
In Partitas, each element of the journey is conceived as a variation. The walls are not boundaries, but surfaces of expansion. Over an entire section, old musical scores are covered with ink drawings, blending the randomness of the line with the rigor of the staves.
A nearly empty canvas sketches the beginnings of a score yet to come, suspended in its fertile incompleteness. An alcove invites visitors to create their own Partitas, in a playful mise en abyme of the artistic process. The ensemble is punctuated by Bach's compositions, bringing a unique, almost meditative temporality to the viewing experience.
The genesis of this series is rooted in an encounter: Masha Schmidt's with Carl Czerny's pedagogical scores, an essential companion to any piano learning experience. These exercises, renowned for their austerity, here become the breeding ground for a visual reinvention.
The artist subverts the repetitive, mechanical, and rigid aspect of these studies to breathe new life into them, dictated by her emotions, mood, intuitions, and observations. The eye is invited to read as much as to listen. In this way, each work becomes an act of poetic resistance to the relentless monotony of our lives.
Partitas is not an end, but an opening. It is accompanied by musical performances, meetings, and workshops, extending the work over time and through exchange.
By revisiting the scores and capturing the music in graphic gestures, Masha Schmidt offers us a form of total art, both rigorous and free, which transcends the traditional exhibition framework.
The Galerie de Buci invites us to this unique experience from April 24 to May 24, 2025, at 73 rue de Seine, Paris.
The opening reception will take place on Thursday, April 24, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., in the presence of the artist.
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