Dierk Schmidt, born in Unna, Germany, in 1965, studied art history and visual arts in Düsseldorf and Amsterdam. He takes on the genre of history painting to investigate politics of representation, critically redescribing the production of the historical past and present. Dierk Schmidt has repeatedly worked on issues of colonial history, on restitution politics, international law, and on abstraction in painting, a main project being “The Division Of The Earth“ for documenta 12 in 2007. His analytical approach makes use of painting’s conceptual methods, self-reflexive on the issue of painting and capable of rationalizing representational gaps.