Artist

Schmidt, Marianna

Title

Self-Portrait

Technique

gouache

Dimensions

22.0cm height x 28.0cm width

Type

painting

Accession Number

2018.12.32

Collection

Permanent Collection

Anonymous Gift

Marianna Schmidt (1918-2005) lived and worked in Vancouver, B.C. from the mid-1950s until her death in 2005. Hungarian by birth, she fled her country as a refugee in 1944 and spent years in displaced persons’ camps in Austria, Germany and England before eventually migrating to Canada in 1961. In 1965 she completed a BFA in printmaking at the Vancouver School of Art. Schmidt has exhibited widely both locally and internationally, and her work is included in several public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Canada, the Seattle Art Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery. The most persistent feelings in her work are those of loneliness, alienation and painful dislocation. Whether depicted in prints, drawings, paintings or collages, her twisted, distorted and fragmented figures are often stranded against featureless grounds, huddled in inhospitable rooms or suspended above place maps and generic landscapes.