Artists Kim Schoen and Kim Schoenstadt make light of mistaken identities in collaborative show

This summer, the Los Angeles gallery owner Tim Hawkinson made the most of his nearly Shakespearean history of mistaken identity by giving the Los Angeles artist Tim Hawkinson a solo show featuring, very much on the nose, a series of self-portraits. It culminated in the “first ever Tim Hawkinson look-alike party”.

Now, after years of being mistaken for each other, the conceptual-minded Los Angeles artists Kim Schoen and Kim Schoenstadt are also leaning into the confusion with their first joint gallery show, Schoen/Stadt (3 November-14 December), at the Central Server Works project space in Venice. Curated by Yann Perreau as part of the roving programme Here is Elsewhere, Schoen/Stadt is billed as “the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles of Rexigenian-Landauer-American artist Kim² Schoen/Stadt”.

The show will feature posters the Kims have developed together, some works they have made independently that explore ideas of doubling and a pair of passport photos they created with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) so that each photograph is a hybrid of them both. The artists, who briefly went by Kim 1 and Kim 2 before forgetting who was who, titled the passport piece Both Both Neither Neither (2024). All works in the show are attributed to Schoen/Stadt.

The two artists got to know each other, they relay in a phone interview where it’s tricky at times to tell them apart, thanks to what Schoen calls “hiccups of misidentification”. Schoenstadt, who tends to make drawings and installations (now textiles too) inspired by architecture, remembers being congratulated on an exhibition of photographs that she had nothing to do with. Schoen, known for photo- and text-based work that exposes systemic (also capitalist) absurdity, remembers receiving a contract from the Artist Pension Trust meant for Schoenstadt.
They first talked about making work together—a poster for an exhibition, if not an entire exhibition—about a decade ago. “We’ve been toying with this idea for a long time,” says one of the Kims. “Our original idea was to do banners up and down Wilshire Boulevard [as if] for a major museum show.”

“In the multiple worlds theory of what this show could be, there were a lot of directions we could go,” says the other Kim. But the idea did not take off until Tim Hawkinson the gallerist, who exhibited Schoenstadt’s work in August, organised the artist Tim Hawkinson’s extravaganza. “It lit a fire under my butt,” she says.

As they spoke on the phone, more areas of overlap in the Venn diagram that is their joint identity came into relief, from their senses of humour (on the dry side) to their heights (both are 5ft 8in tall). Both Kims have some German Jewish ancestry. Both were mentored by giants of conceptual art.

“I studied under Allan Sekula at CalArts, who was more of a documentary realist, but my interest in language and images comes a lot from studying under him,” says Schoen.

“I never did an MFA, but I worked for John Baldessari for 20 years, and that was my graduate school,” says Schoenstadt.

The Kims say they never considered another exhibition title. “It was always Schoen/Stadt,” says Schoenstadt. “It was always Schoen/Stadt,” echoes Schoen, “because it was so simple, and embeds both of us in one.”

“Schoen” means “beautiful” in German and “shoe” in Dutch, while “stadt” means “city” in German. Or, as Perreau puts it: “Stadt is the state of being where Schoens live.”

• Schoen/Stadt, 3 November-14 December, Central Server Works, at Edwin Chan’s EC3 Studio, Los Angeles