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22/2/2012

Andreas Schulze

Team Gallery - Wooster Street, New York

Team Gallery is pleased to present an installation of new work by Köln-based artist Andreas Schulze.

Andreas Schulze's practice allows for complex architectural settings that delight in domestic furniture and manicured gardens that have excessively round, full, and deep anatomies. For the artist's first exhibition at Team Gallery, Schulze presents new paintings alongside painted and found objects like lamps, tables, chairs, carpets, and curtains, accompanied by a hand-painted gallery floor. The immersive and site-specific installation re-configures the variable spatial relationships of viewer and object, viewer and window, viewer and painting.

The installation includes various domestic furniture pieces in the working method of Allan Kaprow or Gilbert and George, for instance - situated in a congruent zone of life and art. Human-scaled harlequin lamps have thick, patterned trucks topped with bulbous, oversized shades. A carpet placed at the entryway functions as a domestic doormat, while a second carpet is installed in the corner as a three-sided inverted-pyramid sculpture. Entitled Dirt Corner, the material is painted in gradients to gradually shade to black in the center, a humorous household dust bunny doubling as an intergalactic black hole. A hanging curtain presents the façade of a small home with one door and one window, while simultaneously functioning as a space divider one might find inside a massive living area. Painted cotton panels function as unusable tablecloths, elaborately covering a table's surface in a parallel gesture to the horizontal painting that covers the floor.

The subjects of Schulze's work are impenetrable windows, doors, and mirrors, nebulous interiors and landscapes. He obsessively undulates between hard and soft, inside and outside, playful and melancholic, comfortable and menacing. His flat painting style paired with the extreme depth of his illusions belies Schulze's complicated relationship to the history of painting. He employs the perspectival foreshortening and sfumato tonal shading techniques of realism that date back to the Renaissance, in addition to using the barren landscape backgrounds of Surrealism, the absurd object mash-ups of dada, the accessible furniture design art of Wiener Werkstätte and the Bauhaus, and the dramatically rendered subjects of neo-expressionist painting of the 1980s, among which his work was first shown and associated. His painted room and object installations stand in close relationship to the elaborate narrative scenes set by Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, and Kurt Schwitters.

Schulze's intricate and evocative dramatic sites are reminiscent of Wagnerian opera or ancient Greek theater. Schulze returns to New York with a poetic, yet tense, amalgam of installation, painting, and sculpture, in which every object is sabotaged furniture, a decorated and mythic object for living, suffused with extreme magnitude while rinsed of all function.

Schulze was born in Hannover in 1955 and has been exhibiting his work since 1981. Last year the artist had a major survey exhibition with an extensive catalogue published by the Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg and the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren. Schulze's work has been exhibited at museums internationally including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Museum in London, and the Kunstforeningen in Copenhagen, among many others.

Image: Andreas Schulze: Untitled (Köln Room 2), 2010, mixed media, installation view at Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg

Opening: 23 February 2012 - 18:00

Team Gallery
47 Wooster Street New York
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm.
Admission free

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