Using improvisation, humor, and relationality, Alex Schmidt fondles fault lines between performance (figure modeling, plays, video), social engagement (audience participation, pedagogy), text (scripts, songs, books), and painting. These forms infest one another, evolving into mixed-media works that engage with precarity and the paradox of choice. Schmidt treats each gesture as rehearsal for ongoing work, scaffolding tropes such as tableau vivant, homage, mise en abyme, and set design. Performances and their painted counterparts are palimpsests referencing countless rehearsals woven into becoming. Whereas their paintings incorporate past choices not retained, modular, participatory performances remix asymptotically. Paintings act as props, set pieces, and co-stars; a pose feeds a painting; a wall becomes a body; a poem is both sculpture and song; the audience is an actor. Texts underscore the ambivalent and ouroboric power dynamic of “utopian parasitism.” Citing and repeating, Schmidt's practice asserts that no artist is an island and no artwork is static: today is tomorrow’s yesterday.

Alex Schmidt (b. Chicago, IL) works across performance, painting, text, social-engagement, and set design. Schmidt is a Whitney Museum Independent Study Program Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Fellow (2024-2025). They have held solo presentations at Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York, NY), 21st Street Projects for Critical Practices Inc (New York, NY), ENTRANCE Gallery (Marfa, TX), and Olympia (New York, NY), among others. They have performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Swiss Institute, MoMA PS1, the Kitchen, BOFFO, Blade Study, Galerie Timonier, Duplex NYC, OLYMPIA, Essex Flowers, Abrons Art Center, and PERFORMA, among others. Schmidt was a Shandaken: Storm King Artist in Residency (2025), a Ruth Stanton Scholar from 2020-2023, and the 2024 Mayer Foundation grant recipient. Schmidt’s work has been reviewed by the New Yorker, Vogue, Dazed Magazine, Office Magazine, Paper, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and Art 21. Schmidt has written for The Whitney Review, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and The Public Review.