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In her work, Julia Schmidt reflects upon the medium of painting. She explores decorative and pictorial qualities, the commodity and fetishistic character of painting, and the relationship between real and painted themes. Her main focus is on presentation forms and the market value of painting, as well as on matters regarding value preservation and their critical analysis. She finds her image motifs, which she starkly reduces and paints on wood, in both the world of so-called high culture and the mass medium of the Internet. The images refer, through the choice of motif and image detail, to something that already exists. Her motif repertoire ranges from discarded printing plates by Edgar Degas to image captions by Frans Hals to the water-damaged backs of canvases of well-known paintings and pictures right down to photographic fragments of everyday situations and objects.

Julia Schmidt lives and works in Leipzig. She studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig from 1995 to 1998. From 1998 to 2000 she attended the Glasgow School of Art, completing her studies with a Bachelor of Arts degree. The following year she earned a degree from the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. In 2006 she received the Sachsen LB Art Prize and presented the exhibition “Tourism and Painting” in the Leipzig Museum of Visual Arts and the exhibition “New Fabrics” in the Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York City. Julia Schmidt was selected as the 2008 winner of the Villa Romana Award.