About

Maria Kleinschmidt is a designer and lecturer who teaches design students across drawing, color, and fashion illustration.

Her practice and her pedagogy are closely linked: teaching prompts her to investigate particular ideas, topics and materials, and what she discovers in her studio consistently feeds back into the classroom. This reciprocal process—one practice informing the other—gives her work a both methodical and exploratory quality.

She is especially drawn to figurative drawing and portraiture, analogue collage techniques, and —more recently— also abstract wall-based work. Her figurative works are mostly on paper or cardboard, often using rough, found materials. She works from an extensive collection of old colored papers which she uses like paint: Placing patches of paper, drawing over them, adding more paper of a different color on top again and so forth. This technique allows unplanned shaping, rearrangement, and painterly modulation.

Artworks

Original artworks as well as unlimited prints are available on SaatchiArt.

Education

2021 – 2025 → MA Design, Fachhochschule Potsdam
2010 – 2015 → BA Art and Visual History / Philosophy, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
2001 – 2007 → Diploma (FH) Communication Design, Fachhochschule Potsdam

Teaching Experience

• Fachhochschule Potsdam → color and drawing classes (2020 – present), 12 SWS
• Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau → artistic basics classes (2018 – 2019), 12 SWS
• Fachhochschule Potsdam → color and drawing classes (2015 – 2017), 14 SWS
• HTW Berlin → fashion drawing classes (2010 – 2011), 5 SWS
• Universität der Künste Berlin → fashion drawing classes (2008 – 2013), 4 SWS

Books published as an illustrator

• Grand Paris (2017), written by Stefanie von Wietersheim
• Tante Karos Gefühl für Stil (2013), written by Beate Berger

Capabilities

• Portrait Commissions
• Illustration
• Graphic Design
• Layouting
• Mural Art

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