Schmid-Tupou studied at the Braunschweig University of Art under the Norwegian painter Olav Christopher Jenssen, with whom she completed both her diploma and her post graduate studies. At the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, she received her Master of Arts under the painter Gabriele Basch and her Bachelor of Illustration under the artist Gesa Lange. In New Zealand, she studied painting and drawing for one year with Richard Fahey and Emma Smith at Unitec in Auckland.

Over the years, she has cooperated and acted in various artist groups such as projektKLUB and Tapir&Klotz. During her studies in Hamburg she was involved in the publication of several issues of the LUKS magazine, which received numerous awards, including the European Design Award (TUR), the Joseph Binder Award (A), the MfG Award (DE) and the Carl H Dietze Prize (DE).

Her works can be found in private collections in Germany, Sweden, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia.

Education

“Walk See Draw Paint Shape”

Ulrich Krempel on Lena Schmid-Tupou

Lena Schmid-Tupou’s art lives from nature as well as from the urban environment she inhabits. Ever since she began working in often far-flung places, her immediate perception of the things in front of and around her has been the primary driving force behind her artistic endeavours. As she walks and wanders about, a multitude of views of objects and elements in the landscape opens up to her. Employing very different strategies, she approaches her subject matter with her artistic media.

When making etchings and drawings, her strategy is a very direct one; in the face of things or landscapes, she works without any visual control, translating what she sees into lines and arrays of strokes without looking down at the sketchpad or etching plate. Her professional knowledge of the process is a prerequisite; an intuition of the format of the support in front of her, confidence in the guiding, the placing and lifting of the pen or stylus are necessary to minimise the risk of error. Place names and dates are added later, seemingly clumsily noted at the spur of the moment, laterally reversed, thus recording the moment of creation.

The paintings are made in the studio; visual experiences in nature, gained while travelling, walking or hiking, form the basis for her work on them. Memory is here the medium that gives rise to the development of lines and forms. The artist speaks of her spontaneity, her intuitive decisions in front of the picture plane when rendering forms, setting colours. Her artistic professionalism is the prerequisite for the realisation of a successful work.

Begun in 2018, her series of works with the descriptive title “Interfaces” encompasses glimpses of mountainous landscapes with intensely coloured surfaces seemingly arise before us. In “Interfaces 7”, for example, our combinatorics of sight suggests a view from an elevated position down onto a path (or a course of water) that rises upwards in an arc to the right. The horizon is dominated by two mountain peaks; the mountainous formations in blue-green and brown enclose the pictorial space. However, the illusion of a mountain landscape is broken by means of the flattish forms in pink and olive; we are referred back to the two-dimensional composition with another rising diagonal (in pink) and areas bordered by rising lines. Overall, however, the scene is one illuminated by the bright light of day.

No longer can any of the certainty inherent in a traditional landscape view be found in these works. In “Interfaces 3”, composed in darker tones dominated by blue and violet, two elliptoid and kidney-like forms in dark blue confound our desire to see an extended landscape. Are there indications of lakes or rivers there? If so, why then do they not fit into a landscape perspective as we know it from the 19th century? 

Lena Schmid-Tupou constructs landscapes of emotion and memory in her pictures, in which objects and compositions develop spontaneously and not under the dictates of perspective. This is evident in the works on “Ngorongoro”(2019) and “Matamata”(2020), a volcano in Tanzania and a small town in New Zealand. In these paintings, the artist abandons the horror vacui that still completely fills the picture field in the “Interfaces”. The scenes are now more compact, the compositions clearly conceivable as a part of a larger whole and placed like signets of a pars pro toto in a often still blank white picture plane. The painterly action is condensed in these works, creating a new field of vision. The representations are more concentrated than before, more compact, more physical. The painting style is also now more open. Spatiality is emphasised in glazed passages, light reflections and translucent light. Physicality becomes clearly visible – as in “Ngorongoro 1”. The composition suggests three-dimensionality.

This aspect is fully realised in the artist’s work in the field of ceramics and finally her glass sculptures. The mountainous shapes of the ceramics with their glazes that often change colour during the firing process seem like a consequential continuation of the concentration procedures employed in the paintings. In this most recent new stage of Lena Schmid-Tupou’s work, the blown glass sculptures from the “Lumen” series, light already appears enclosed in the glass bodies. Their coloured corporeality is intensified to the highest degree by the incident light in the presentation. The polychromacity of the bodies quotes that of the paintings in a unique fashion, professionally realised under the conditions of glassblowing, in negative forms designed by the artist. Placed next to each other on a pedestal in the exhibition, these light bodies finally create an imaginary landscape for us with all kinds of views at and through.

Ulrich Krempel is the former director of Sprengel Museum in Hannover.

Grants and scholarships

Current and upcoming exhibitions

Past exhibitions