Born in 1973 in Stade, Germany, Iris Schomaker has reached international acclaim through her often large-scale, watercolor paintings of landscapes and figures. What is actually represented in her paintings is secondary to Schomaker’s oeuvre: her work is primarily about the process of representation, about exploring painterly possibilities and the reproduction of atmospheric content. The artist finds her own original visual language in the tension between figurative representation and painterly abstraction.

Schomaker’s palette, mainly applied onto paper, is quiet, and its pastel hues diverge little from black, white, and grey tones. This lends her paintings a drawing-like aspect, which is emphasized still further by the remaining traces of the working process. The searching movements of the lines that document the process of composition appear through the glazed application of paint and fuse with them. Her paintings are just as much about the process of capturing something in a drawing and the discovery of a painterly composition, as they are about the motif itself and its atmospheric and physical qualities.

Iris Schomaker studied Fine Arts in Kiel, Germany, and Trondheim and Bergen, Norway. She has participated in various national exhibitions, including Berlinische Galerie in 2007 and 2010 and in 2013 at Frankfurter Kunstverein. In 2014 she was participant at the biennale in Posnan. Her works can be found in numerous public and private collections.

The artist lives and works in Berlin.

[Galerie Thomas Schulte]