About Silfra

Text: Nele Kaczmarek

At the spot where the European and North American tectonic plates meet, the Silfra Fissure pierces through the Icelandic national park Þingvellir. Surrounded by four active volcanoes, Hrómundartindur, Hengill, Prestahnjúkur, and Hrafnabjörg, the kilometer-long gorge opens up, nourished by clear water bubbling out of the lava rock. The view extends almost 100 meters into the stream, with streaks of green and red-brown shimmering algae. A tourist magnet, but also a mythologically- and historically-laden place, where one of the world’s first parliaments met around the year 900. A crack, a gaping wound that grows a few millimeters every year, that ‚works‘ and allows the rock to be understood as a living creature.

”Mountains are beings, if you pay attention“, Etel Adnan once remarked in relation to her own painting. As a vital counterpart, mountains, but also fields, moors or lakes regularly find their way into Lena Schmid-Tupou’s artistic forms and colors. Her forays and hikes through Iceland, Sweden, Northern Germany, and again and again New Zealand, to which she also has family connections, are like expeditions. There she ‚reads‘ lines, silhouettes and also color tones in order to subsequently – a few seconds or months later – process them in drawings, paintings and sculptures. Over the years, she has developed her very own abstract, artistic vocabulary with affinities to recurring pictorial images that come together to form ever new suggestive landscapes.

In her thinking and in her art, Schmid-Tupou hardly differentiates between inner and outer nature. What is perceived and what is imagined become blurred. Rather, the question is which “shapes and colors resonate in the body” (Schmid-Tupou) and which can follow the lines and color fields previously set in the painting process. Or, as Gaston Bachelard put it in The Poetics of the Room: „Let us resume contact with shorter daydreams that are awakened by the details of things, by traits that seem insignificant at first glance.“ Schmid-Tupou freely combines different references: The remembered outlines of passing fields shimmer in the paintings, perhaps in the green-blue of cell phone displays. And rays of light flashing from the dense treetops may have taken on the purple and red-brown of two parked cars in their fixation on the painting surface.

As a „place where the power of the earth can be seen directly in its topology, in its protrusions and indentations, as well as in its color tones“ (Schmid-Tupou), the Silfra Fissure has also moved Schmid-Tupou to an artistic meditation on temporality. Colored inserts, the so-called olivine, or inclusions from surrounding rock, have found their way into the artist’s paintings of the same name as touching or overlapping colored surfaces.  In the form of ‚materialized and layered time‘ they relate the centuries-old formation of the rocks, as well as of the moment of their perception and their inscription on the canvas.

– Nele Kaczmarek is the former curator of Kunstverein Braunschweig.

About Lumen

Lumen is a series of glass sculptures inspired by the paintings of the series Silfra and the ceramic sculptures Landmannalaugar. They are an examination of light and color and investigate painting through material. Lumen was sponsored by the Alexander Tutsek Foundation and manufactured at Monmouth Glass Studio in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Tender Courage

Text: Nina Roskamp

As Lena Schmid-Tupou does not perceive the two-dimensionality of the canvas as a limitation, her work neatly eludes categorization. To her, the canvas is first and foremost a research space that invites her, the artist, to reminisce, offering an opportunity to transform both herself and her artistic work. When the artist gives herself up to a state of potential discomfort, this is a testament to her empathy, which is transferred boundlessly when I, as a viewer, engage with her work. Haptic memories are created via explorations with and through the material, with new realities sometimes emerging, that bear witness to a physical capability in the working process.

In her works from the Komorebi series, the sedate limbo of Silfra, a series of works by the artist from 2020, appears to have been subject to further development: The narrative style of this series, whose name translates to “light shining through the trees”, is more radical and unsparing. Schmid-Tupou has taken a step closer, walking through a drier, less crowded world than in Silfra, without moving away from her core theme, the impressions left by nature.

With this, she conquers the space a little more, she moves closer to the source. Once again, her work is concerned with a direct exploration of the environment by means of a physical experience with the material and the painting’s background. And she remains – and in this the artist stays true to herself – close to the experience, close to the impressive.

Lena Schmid-Tupou takes her work one step further, translating elements of her painting into glass sculptures. Here, she creates a synchronous experience combining transparency, physicality and reflection. Fragility and stability, vulnerability and strength are the potentially corresponding components of a complete oeuvre, the empathy inherent in which becomes palpable in the shared experience with the visitors who view her work as they walk.

The works exhibited at Kunstverein Braunschweig are a further development of Schmid-Tupou’s ceramic work series Landmannalaugar, which refers specifically to a mountainous region in the southwest region of Iceland that she first visited in 2008. The pull exerted by this country with its prodigious natural phenomena charms many artists, including the American Roni Horn, who describes the region’s nature as beguiling and disturbing by turns. Schmid-Tupou takes another approach to a country that is slowly being overrun by mass tourism – vulnerably and courageously.

Her explorations invariably demonstrate a remarkable sense of coloring, fragmentation and communication. The works testify to the dissolution of boundaries, while simultaneously defining questions of presence both carefully and concretely. The power of our environment and a reality which can prove hard to subdue demand tender courage and openness.

– Nina Roskamp is the director of the gallery Geyso20 in Braunschweig, Germany.

About Interfaces

In her series Interfaces, Lena Schmid-Tupou explores the different landscapes she has seen and lived in and arranges her impressions in various compositions on her canvas. She creates landscapes from her memory without the aspiration of being realistic. When working on the series, she had a phrase in mind that her friend once told her; it was a reception in her friend’s mother tongue that translates into “My mountains and rivers welcome you”. She also thought of something the Lebanese poet and artist Etel Adnan once said in an interview: “Mountains are beings if you pay attention.”

For Schmid-Tupou the landscape and the nature that surrounds her is immensely influential on her work. In her paintings, drawings, and sculptures, she captures what she sees and feels when being outdoors. She sometimes describes a feeling of being overwhelmed when she travels to new places, and she describes nature as breathtaking.

With Interfaces, she brings together places from different sides of the planet and combines them in the series. Some shapes may remind us of mountains or rivers, some of lakes or fields. Schmid-Tupou does not differentiate between inner and outer nature. To her, the things we see are in the same way important like the things we imagine, dream of or what we feel. This series gives us ideas about landscapes we know, but also leaves a lot of room for our own interpretation.

About Te Araroa

Te Araroa is a small town near the east cape of Aotearoa New Zealand. Lena Schmid-Tupou found it fascinating and poetic to think of an area that is the first one to see the sun in the morning. The first one to start the new day and the first one to start the new year.

Te Araroa is also the name of a trail that goes from the most northern part of the north island of Aotearoa all the way to the most southern point of the south island. In this series, Schmid-Tupou explores different stages of an imaginary landscape that appears on the canvas while painting.

Te Araroa No 1 gives us the impression of a sunrise, where in Te Araroa No 2 we get a feeling of a foggy day. Te Araroa No 4 feels like we are looking over a mountain ridge in a night sky filled with stars and moons. And Te Araroa No 6 is like a field of flowers that become blurred in Te Araroa No 7 in the mid day sun. 

About Matamata

Matamata is a series named after a little town in the Waikato region in Aotearoa New Zealand. Green hills and farmland surround the town. The title was inspired through the exploration of the color green. In Lena Schmid-Tupou’s work, we often find an allocation through her titles. It sometimes gives the impression she is mapping a world we get to explore through her work. 

About Ngorongoro

Ngorongoro is a series that gets its name from the volcanic Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania at the edge of the Serengeti. Ngorongoro is a UNESCO world heritage site and sacred land to the Maasai. Schmid-Tupou has never visited Tansania, but was inspired by the colors and the history of the land. She created a series of oil paintings, drawing her color inspiration from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.