Schmidt has produced an extensive and homogeneous artistic oeuvre, which he began creating in the mid-eighties. A complex of themes very quickly crystallized: the figurative image. He used colored pencils, charcoal, watercolors, wax crayons, and acrylic paint to produce these images on paper or, from the late eighties, on canvas. Schmidt works with one formal element more than any other: the circle. Each of them emerges out of a series of circular strokes placed alongside or on top of one another and accordingly generates an intense coloristic effect. The artist uses these elements to develop his figures, depicting each part of the body, such as the torso, arms, legs, and face through these circular forms. Over the years, his works have become more and more expressive, and there has also been an increasing number of new motifs, such as birds, bicycles, and—since 1999—airplanes, all of which also often appear very abstract. Most of his figures, which he depicts standing alone or in rows of two or three, are not presented as belonging to any gender. Occasionally we find images of women, whom the artist often distinguishes from other figures by depicting them with long hair. Schmidt has brought all of these themes together in two large-format works on canvas: airplanes are lined up alongside people, bicycles, and birds.

Arnold Schmidt was born in Wiener Neustadt on July 16, 1959. He attended the elementary school and had already been placed in various homes during his early adolescence. At the age of fifteen, he moved back in with his mother, but she was almost never home. He began an apprenticeship as a bricklayer and then, after one and a half years, switched to join the house painters and decorators, but he never completed his apprenticeship. In 1983 he entered the Lower Austrian State Hospital for Psychiatry and Neurology at Klosterneuburg: his artistic talent was soon discovered, and he moved into the “House of Artists” in 1986. Schmidt regularly goes to the atelier gugging, and almost all of his works have been created there.