Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen (b.1963) is a visual artist who lives and works in Copenhagen. His medium is painting, installations, and poetry. Educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1986-92 and was a lecturer at the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts from 1998-2004. Schmidt-Rasmussen is represented at collections such as the Statens Museum for Kunst and Sammlung Essl in Vienna and he has had solo exhibitions at several of the Danish art centres for contemporary art and art galleries. He has received several awards, including the Statens Kunstfond's three-year work grant, the Carnegie Art Award 2011, and Jens Søndergaard's painting grant.
In the exhibition 'We are Tools to fix a Broken Universe’ one can experience some of Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen's newest paintings, all of which are set in a surreal and colourful universe, where animals and symbolic figures such as suns and moons play out different scenarios. The paintings' imaginative and theatrical use of animals, as the main characters of the stories, brings to mind the depictions of universes in children's books. Especially 'Alice in Wonderland (1865)' by Lewis Carroll, where the reader sets out on a journey together with Alice through the rabbit hole and enters a universe where something uncanny and uncontrollable hides beneath the surface. Schmidt-Rasmussen's practice has always been nomadic and he draws inspiration from everywhere. He describes his work with his paintings as going on a journey. A journey where one's travel plans often fall apart and one ends up in a completely different place from the original starting point. He wants to invite the audience into a place, into a universe that is different from where they are coming from. To a place where there is room for imagination and daydreaming.
