Maria Schumacher | CLUMSY CODE

The term clumsy suggests a human quality, while codes evoke order, systems, and technical precision. In the artist’s work, these two principles intersect. The grid serves as a recurring formal and conceptual element. It connects the materiality of the picture surface with digital image logics based on pixels, modules, and repetition, while also referencing craft traditions and early mechanized image-making techniques such as mosaics and cross-stitch.

Works such as Grid Garden, Tipsy Tabs, and Light Rotation begin with software-generated images that are translated into painterly processes and transformed along the way. In Code Switching and Pulsar, by contrast, the imagery emerges from open-ended working processes that combine collage, image transfer, and traditional painting techniques. Recurring motifs are copied, varied, and rearranged at different scales.

The poster wall extends this exploration to questions of the original and reproduction. It references the artist’s studio practice, in which working on screen alternates with working on the picture surface, with both media informing one another. At the same time, it points to the ubiquitous presence of images on our screens. What qualities does an original possess in relation to its reproductions? And how does the notion of originality change in a visual culture in which motifs are constantly copied, transferred, and altered?

Ultimately, the title CLUMSY CODES humorously describes the relationship between systems of rules and awkward gestures. The act of painting integrates itself into existing structures while simultaneously disrupting them. Between order and deviation, repetition and variation, a pictorial space emerges in which apparent predictability encounters chance and spontaneity.

Maria Schumacher (*1983, Bucharest, Romania) lives and works in Leipzig. From 2005 to 2011, she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB), in the class of Neo Rauch and H. C. Ottersbach. From 2011 to 2012, she completed a master’s degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in the United States as part of a Fulbright scholarship.