The artist and graphic designer Wolfgang Schmidt (* July 24, 1929; † March 8, 1995) started designing his own system of signs in 1972: by 1979, 262 of the planned 893 pictograms had been completed and combined, they make up over 394 variations. Based on the human body and its environment, Wolfgang Schmidt created a catalogue of signs with the aim of "measuring the cosmos of his feelings and experiences".
The exhibition “all the things you are” traces this catalogue and shows original prints as well as a selection of manuscripts and plans. They provide information about Schmidt's artistic approaches and show the signs applied to other formats and media. The exhibited works are complemented with new works that address questions of identity, emotion and communication raised by Schmidt's sign system.
The workshop, exhibition, reader and lecture-talk were created in collaboration with children, art-makers, designers, researchers as well as with some of his companions. The formats circle around the system of signs of life and correlate them to the current social re-orientation in processing emotions and signs.
The opening of the exhibition on April 15, 2019 was accompanied by a joint lecture-talk with the emotion historian Philipp Nielsen from the Max-Planck-Institute in Berlin