Exhibition at the Pellegrini Gallery in Murten
Listen to pictures - paint music
In 2021, Coni Schmid met the musician and music teacher Susanna Dill in Murten. Further musical training led to a friendship with Susanna and ultimately to this painterly-musical conversation, as John Cage would put it.
Painting and music are sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, sometimes poetic, sometimes fiery, sometimes sensual or experimental. Both painting and music play the entire color palette of the emotional keyboard.
You don't have to understand painting or music, you can only feel them. Painting and music, Josef Brogli traces this phenomenon in the following text:
“The instruments are tuned. A few last murmurs in the audience. Silence. Here she comes, the conductor! Polite applause. An image can emerge:
If her baton were now a paintbrush, if the tension of the musicians were a canvas, what shapes and figures I could discover! What pictures would emerge from the conductor's arm movements with abrupt sideways movements and delicate lifts. Look, the left hand forms soft arcs! Now the hand remains motionless at the top - please hold on! The conductor draws the score in the air! Actually, she could also dance, she shapes the music with her body either way. My conductor embodies the music. When I follow the conductor's movements and aerial images, I see my music in her movements.
How feared they were, the titanic conductors Toscanini, Muti, Furtwängler or von Karajan. They drew their musical images in the air with their batons, hammering, sketching, beating, hammering and stabbing. - What does my conductor do, no, the painter? Is her baton painting lush baroque forms? Does she turn Debussy into Japanese calligraphy? Is she holding up the Great Gate of Kiev with both arms in Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition”?
Coni Schmid owes one of her most touching musical images to conductor Claudio Abbado: the last bars of Schubert's Unfinished. Abbado holds his right hand up in tense calm, his left hand sideways outwards. His hands remain tense. They show the audience: Hold this tension with me! Please don't clap now! Please let the last notes reverberate, fade away, even if you can no longer hear anything, let the music have its space. Listen to yourselves. Close your eyes, let images emerge. - At some point, someone will dare to clap. I can now cover my most beautiful musical image with the varnish of memory.”
Coni Schmid taught art for 17 years at the Bern and Biel School of Design. She has been a freelance artist since 2018.
Coni Schmid's painting moves between figuration and abstraction, depending on the choice of subject and pictorial statement. Art historical references to William Turner, Claude Monet, Wassiliy Kandinsky, Marc Rothko and Cy Twombly cannot be overlooked. Coni Schmid combines tradition with contemporary social reflection.
Opening hours:
Friday 17 h - 19 h
Saturday 15 h - 18 h
Sunday 11 h - 14 h
Sat 5. 04. 2025 - Sat 26. 04. 2025
Vernissage: Sat 5. 04. 2025, 17 h - 20 h Performance: Susanna Dill and Coni Schmid
Sat 12. 04. 2025, 15 h - 18 h Performance: Coni Schmid and Susanna Dill
Dates and timetable
From 5 to 26 Apr 2025
Friday17:00 - 19:00
Saturday15:00 - 18:00
Sunday11:00 - 14:00
Ruth Pellegrini
Galerie Pellegrini, Deutsche Kirchgasse 31
3280 Murten
+41 76 530 34 66
