ANDREAS SCHMIDT

ABOUT THE ARTIST

WORKS

ABOUT THE ARTIST

INTRODUCTION

The sound of Las Vegas Candy colored like a welcome cocktail is our image of Las Vegas. Everything goes, we're in it, bet all we have or – just wait and see. The grand hotel is glowing in a different wild color every minute, money has brought things to the Nevada desert that simply make us wonder. And there is sound. More a sound layer, made of the noises of the gambling halls, from their alluring machines, cards and dices, groaning or discretely rejoicing gamblers and specially the clanking jackpot, that makes everyone prick up their ears. It is exactly this sound layer that is the key to understand this artificial paradise, it's like the chandelier sparkling thousandfold above the endless rows of gambling machines, it's everywhere, in every fiber of the omnipresent wall-to-wall carpeting, the perfectly papered concrete walls of the suites, in all the seductive pop facades of the Strip, in each of the millions of alluring light bulbs. This is the sound of things called grand, as almost everything is called here. A German photographer has devoted himself to this phenomenon with all his senses. He traced the seduction, that is planned in every detail, for six years. It seems that Andreas Schmidt has put his ear to every thing before stepping back and photographing it. He did it his way: The sound is in every one of his pictures, the sound of money, that Las Vegas is built on, in the middle of nothing, like on a rock of nickels and dimes. That's the surface he is showing from a conscientious, yet fascinated, distance. But isn't there something else to be heard, something almost historical, when shuffling back over the thick carpets to the suite after the show or the night elegantly gambled away? Snatches of the songs of the big entertainers, who were here, who gave their American souls to that artificial place: Frankie Boy, Dean, Sammy Davies Jr. and all the others. All that is embraced in Schmidt's grand color formats – a veritable soundtrack of Las Vegas in pictures. Andreas Schmidt shows us the fully saturated surfaces of artificial space from a fascinated but critical distance, with almost British understatement. Schmidt's work has been recognized and appreciated through comprehensive exhibitions and publications for years in London his adopted home and Europe. Horst Klöver