Howard Scott Gallery is pleased to announce the opening - on Thursday, 8 March - of a solo exhibition by the German painter, Werner Schmidt. The exhibition takes its title - Little Berlin Skies - from a suite of paintings executed in 2006. Similarly to the Berlin Blues suite of paintings from 2005, these paintings share a structure in which multiple panels, each conceived as a separate work, are joined as a diptych or a quartet. Through articulation of both the palette and the edges of the individual components and the placement of each within the structure, Schimdt is able to affect the visual and kinesthetic response of the viewer to the complete work.

Dirk Teuber, a German art historian and curator, discusses the difference between the "suggestive infinite color-space" achieved by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman in their mature works and the "naturalism" of Werner Schmidt, which he associates not with the two heroic figures' search for a state of transcendence in painting, but rather with the more process-oriented approach of Schmidt in his "living diversification in perception, released by the procedure of painting." As always, color is a major concern of the artist in the works to be seen. He continues in the specificity of his approach to painting: the making of his own painting mediums, the employing of relatively unusual materials (an archival cardboard mounted on wood as a support), and the use of modular elements to achieve a grander scale.

The artist was born in the Black Forest region in 1953. For the past several years, he has divided his time between studios in the town of Oberkirch and Berlin. The artist was included in a recent exhibition at the Royal Hiberian Academy in Dublin, Ireland entitled "Joyce In Art." His work is in numerous collections in Europe and in the United States. The forthcoming show marks his sixth exhibition with Howard Scott Gallery.