Wilma SchnellPlein Air

Wilma Schnell (born 1935, Munich) presents for the first time a series of her paintings and works on paper in the context of a gallery setting. She BAM! is excited about making public the ‘grand début’ of these pieces in the exhibition ‘Plein Air’.

Schnell’s artistic journey had its start at Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where she studied from 1956 to 1961. Wilma Schnell never had the ambition of making public her artworks. Though she practised art among some of the most acclaimed artists of the 20th century, her work has remained mostly hidden from the public eye — until now. The exhibition ‘Plein Air’ is both an invitation to look at the period in which Schnell started her practice, as well as the personal world, the stories, and journeys that have informed her travail and find vivid expression in her works.

The exhibition features watercolors on paper, made between the 70s and now, and a selection of oil on canvas paintings that she made in the 60s and 70s. Already in the early 60s, highly independent and outside of every cliché of that time, Wilma Schnell frequently travelled around the world, almost always alone, and also brought people into her own. She wanted to draw and grant herself this freedom. She drew every place she visited, with the ambition of documenting her surroundings. Her journeys were punctuated by visits to her sister in Paris, where she exchanged ideas about art while navigating between German and French art culture, with on the top an incredible admiration for Italian culture. Wilma Schnell has two children, both artists now. Her daughter Katharina Schnell became a talented musician and her son, David Schnell, is an internationally exhibited German painter and one of the representatives of the ‘New Leipzig School’.

Wilma Schnell’s way of working is fluid, experimental, and open, often articulating architectures in abstract forms with watercolors on paper. While doing so, she makes use of a colour palette that is lively and vivid. Schnell’s ‘touché’, vulnerable and sensitive, is like a musical note composing a song on paper. In her landscapes, she distinctly explores the possibilities of colour and form.

In parallel to this, Wilma Schnell has portrayed people in their surroundings. She does not draw or paint from photographs — the model stands in front of her, the figure moves before her eyes while she composes. She developed a large series of figurative portraits with rich and joyful colors and abstract shapes. They represent moments of eternity, of flowing movements through straight lines. Wilma Schnell is able to show this constant motion with her brushstrokes. While things flow before her eyes, she catches an exact moment, her exact moment, of life; of living in ‘Plein Air’. ‘Plein Air’ features a selection of Schnell’s remarkable artworks — a selection out of the thousands of works that can be found in her house and ‘Plein Air’ is above all an ode to the work of Wilma Schnell, depicting both the past and the present of a great artist of our time.