Randall Schmit (b. 1955) is an American artist of Dutch descent. A twice recipient of the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Artist's Support Grant (2014, and 2011); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Individual Artist Grant (2017); and Recipient of the Berkshire-Taconic A.R.T. Foundation Grant (2013). He is also recipient of the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant; and an Invitational Travel Grant from the US Consulate General (Istanbul, Turkey); working primarily in painting and collage. Lives and works in New York, NY and Hudson Valley, New York.
During 2013 the artist visited Cuba on a Travel Fellowship with the American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba.
His paintings are included in the Permanent Collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY); the New Orleans Museum of Art; Ogden Museum of Art (New Orleans); Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art (Malibu, CA); and many others.
While surréal in its dreamlike presentation, the organization of Schmit's narrative is informed by the Renaissance Way of joining secular and mythical images into numerous realistic spaces and with ambiguous relationships to one another. Figures in the paintings have evolved from recognizable human forms to biomorphic, gestural images, each transformed as reptilian and insectile in order to insure their own survival. Every figure represents an unique ‘nervous system’ arising from differing points of view in response to environmental challenges. In the process of defining its own identity, each being constantly transforms in an ever and quickly changing world.
According to museum curator Lowery Stokes Sims, Schmit has been "fascinated with cartoons, which have been a starting point in his early work, and has incorporated comic imagery into his work" since at least the early eighties.
In 1982 the artist had his first one-person show, exhibiting a number of large ‘all over’ paintings, at the Betty Cuningham Gallery in Soho. In 1983 he received the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant. In addition to the obvious influences of Surrealism and the mature New York School found in the studio of Schmit's mentor, Ray Parker—a colleague of Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Michael Goldberg and others—the graphic influence of comics and contemporary 1980s East Village Graffiti artists is also seen in Schmit's early work.
Schmit's work gradually evolved into pictographic paintings with polymorphic figures in vaporous, atmospheric settings that were influenced by the study of Mayan Art. This work was exhibited in a 1986 solo exhibit at the fiction/nonfiction Gallery in New York. During that time (1984-1990), he had five solo exhibitions in New Orleans. From these shows, major work was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art and others.
Whether from his childhood in Louisiana, or the influence of Parker's musical interests, Schmit has long held an interest in jazz music, and was included in the important 1997 Smithsonian travelling exhibition, 'Seeing Jazz', alongside a quote from jazz composer, Miles Davis. Drawing with graphite and acrylic paint over snipped images from art magazines, science fiction ephemera, movie and other books and magazines, Schmit has worked with collage since 1991. During a visit to Istanbul, Turkey in 2000, Schmit studied the historic mosaics installed within the ancient architecture there. He exhibited an important group of collage paintings at Galerie Apel in Istanbul that year. These works are psychedelic in nature, with swirling comic and science fiction imagery woven into web-like trails and gestures of paint that bind disparate images together as one entity.
Following his first solo exhibition at the Betty Cuningham Gallery in Soho, New York, the artist exhibited in successive solo exhibitions at the EM Donahue Gallery, New York: 1991(catalogue essay by Lowery Stokes Sims); 1992 (catalogue essay by Frank Gillette), and 1994; as well as at the Gallery Camino Real in Boca Raton, Florida. Schmit has exhibited widely, with several dozen solo exhibits in the USA and Europe. His recent (2014)solo exhibition at the Woodstock Artists Association Museum (WAAM) was a creative departure and a return to earlier surrealist imagery and was met with critical success.
In 2005, he relocated his studio to a few miles north of Hudson in a small village, Valatie/Kinderhook where he lived in a cottage with a 2-storey renovated barn for a studio. Here, he worked through several series of paintings in which deep “portals” invoking landscape, cityscape, as well as abstract spaces were inhabited by figures. A selection of these pictures were shown in a solo exhibit at the Res Nova Gallery in Manhattan during 2007.
