Nicole Schmolzer

Nicole Schmölzer was born
in 1968 in Wettingen, Switzerland.  She
was introduced to painting at an early age through art school at Martenot in Pratteln,
Switzerland, from 1975 through 1988, and completed pedagogical studies at
Martenot in Paris, France in 1988-89.  

While teaching art to those
of different ages in different institutions over the following ten years, she
studied art science and literature/linguistics at the Universities in Basel and
Geneva, concluding with a thesis on Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color.  Her interest in the wide field of art ranges
from personal expression to the social and historical, as well as philosophical
and economical meaning. She completed her postgraduate program on Cultural
Studies in Berlin and Basel, in 1998, and 2003-04 respectively, by writing a
research on company related art awards.

In her painting, Schmölzer
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 the terms “modeling” and “pushing the color
back” to describe her processes of application, spreading, washing off, 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. She travels these spatial
relationships with her innate ability to translate the boundaries between
interior dialogue and imposed definition, between organic experience and
applied order.

Since 1995, Schmölzer has
been working regularly with different galleries showing her work in Europe and
the United States. She has received grants from the Art OMI Foundation New York,
the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, and the Valparaiso Foundation in
Spain.