Hermann Schmidlin R. Neculman (1965) is an artist with Chilean-Swiss nationality and Mapuche* descent straight from his paternal grandmother.
His work is a combination of his origins and the contemporary times in which he has lived. On the one hand, he belongs from a generation of artists deeply marked by the events of the 1970s and 1980s, a period of rapid growth of global capitalism, political upheaval, significant differences in wealth, global media, the heyday of the Cold War and also the end of it, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall. His approach to "primitive art", as he says: "to the implantation of the inner image, the psychic impression" that is related to his experiences in Mapuche communities to which he has approached in search of their roots, incorporating beliefs and ways of understanding the world.
Hence, his work shows both influences from the artistic movements of the time such as Neo-expressionism, which manifested itself in Germany and the United States and the Italian trans-avant-garde, as well as from the Mapuche aesthetics and imaginary. His works, mostly graphic, use engraving and various printing techniques as a medium, as well as painting. They present not much color, are usually monochromatic and contain simple figures, signs without referents that could form the basis of the alphabet of a new language.
Schmidlin has developed his career internationally receiving various awards, including the Prize of the Fourth International Printing Triennial in Kochi, Japan (1999).
* Mapuche is the cultural name of the most notorious ancestral people southern Chile and Argentina.
The MAVI Museum of Visual Arts opens its virtual doors to show works from the #MAVI
Collection with a selection made by researchers Carolina Castro and Carol Illanes.
