“The Typology of Women” by Bastienne Schmidt at the Ricco Maresca Gallery

Ricco/Maresca Gallery is pleased to present “Typology of Women,” an exhibition and book launch on the occasion of award-winning mixed media artist and photographer Bastienne Schmidt’s latest publication. “Typology of Women” comprises a series of hand-painted silhouette cutouts depicting female imagery across cultures and throughout history. Schmidt deliberately uses the term and concept of “typology”—the systematic classification of things according to shared characteristics—as a formal means to explore the symbolic and sociological dimensions of the “type,” thereby offering sharp insights into the complex processes by which female identity is constructed. Schmidt’s silhouettes (rendered in luminous orange as an ironic parallel to a reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” and Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”) portray nuances while unfixing received ideas.

Schmidt was born in Germany and has lived in New York for the past 20 years. She grew up in Greece and Italy as the daughter of an archaeologist, which influenced her creative process in diverse ways. Inspired by Greek ancient ceramics and their thin lined figure drawings, as well as Japanese woodcuts, fairytales, and American pop culture, her work often incorporates and transforms archetypal shapes. Schmidt’s diverse oeuvre (comprising multimedia works, photography, painting, and large-scale drawings) is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, among others. She has been shown nationally and internationally in over 100 exhibitions, among them: the International Center of Photography in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg and the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida. She has published six monographs, including “Vivir la Muerte,” (1996) “American Dreams,” (1997) “Shadowhome,” (2004) “Home Stills,” (2010) “Topography of Quiet,” (2014) and “Typology of Women,” (2016).