Nicole Schmoelzer

Nicole Schmölzer (born 1968, Switzerland) is a painter's painter. Introduced to painting at an early age through the art school Martenot (1975-88), she continued to the Paris branch of Martenot in 1988-89, teaching art during the following 10 years to students of various ages. Schmölzer furthered her education with studies in art science, literature and linguistics at universities in Basel and Geneva, concluding with her thesis on Josef Albers’ interaction of color. Her wide interest in fine art ranges from personal expression to the social and historical, as well as to philosophical and economical meaning. She completed her postgraduate program on Cultural Studies in Berlin and Basel (1998, 2003-04) by publishing a research paper on corporate-related art awards.

Since 1995, Schmölzer has worked regularly with galleries representing her work in Europe and the United States. She received grants from the Art OMI Foundation NY, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain, and Villa Montalvo in California.

Schmölzer's painting focuses on the substantive properties as well as the interactive capacities of color. Her intention is to challenge the limits of color. As she generates greater subtleties in behavior and movement of the medium, the fluidity of the paint becomes structural. She uses terms such as “modeling” and “pushing the color back” to describe her processes of application, spreading, reduction and abrasion of pigment into and off the primed surface. Choosing oil paint for its luminosity, she studies how the layers of colors emit transcendence in their relationship to the shifting planes of dimension. Schmölzer travels these spatial relationships with her innate ability to translate the boundaries between interior dialogue and imposed definition, between organic experience and applied order.

A complete portfolio of her current exhibition may be downloaded here.