Andreas Schulze
dal 1/6/2009 al 27/8/2009
Segnalato da
1/6/2009
Andreas Schulze
Monika Spruth Philomene Magers London, London
Flowers and Landscapes. Presenting five ceramic sculptures and two major new paintings, the exhibition showcases the appealing complexity and subversive luminosity of Schulze's craft, a practice which has earned him widespread respect and extensive influence amongst both his contemporaries and younger artists for over three decades.
Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by acclaimed German artist
Andreas Schulze, in his first solo show in London for five years. Presenting five ceramic sculptures and
two major new paintings, the exhibition showcases the appealing complexity and subversive luminosity
of Schulze’s craft, a practice which has earned him widespread respect and extensive influence
amongst both his contemporaries and younger artists for over three decades.
Andreas Schulze first came to prominence as a pivotal figure in the explosive flourishing of creativity
that centred on Cologne in the early 1980s. Much of the art of that era was concerned with reanimating
the practice of painting with an eye to exploring the emergent crisis of postmodernism. Although
Schulze had close relationships with his contemporaries like Walter Dahn and George Condo, and the
influential art collectives like the ‘Neue Wilde’ and the ‘Mühlheimer Freiheit’ which orbited around
Monika Sprüth’s gallery (founded in 1983) he nonetheless embarked on an independent artistic course,
developing a strikingly unique formal language and tonal style which is most recently manifest in these
new works.
Dominating the exhibition are two large-scale paintings which typify Schulze’s vibrant and powerful
visual style. While stylistically Schulze’s paintings have often echoed and indeed drawn on a Modernist
painting tradition which stretches back to artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, conceptually and
attitudinally his work is suffused with the postmodern sensibility of his contemporaries. Colourful and
curiously somber, Schulze’s acrylic on canvas paintings evoke the melancholia attendant on the
dislocated and fragmented nature of contemporary experience. Void of human figures but often
featuring motifs which sometimes allude to, and sometimes directly represent, domestic and everyday
objects, the paintings point towards fantasies of lost comforts and homes confiscated by a threatening
and alienating world.
Juxtaposed against the Unheimliche atmosphere of Schulze’s paintings are his more playful and
ebullient, yet nonetheless ironic evocations of the Gemütlich in the ceramic sculptures. The sculptures
tap into a vein of Schulze’s practice that is replete with, and almost fetishises, bourgeois décor and
ornamentation, which is symptomatic of Schulze’s fascination with modern yearnings for contentment.
Much of Schulze’s work embraces archaic, naturalistic, sometimes naïve and often primitive styles and
images to instill a kind of nostalgia for a prelapsarian existence which contrasts with the posthuman
condition that Schulze explores in many of his paintings. These sculptures, which take the familiar,
everyday shape of a jug glazed with a deep and strong base colour, and then adorned in a contrasting
hue with an eclectic range of motifs, including abstract shapes as well as natural forms such as leaves
and berries, are drawn from Schulze’s ‘Caraffa, Caraffe’, project begun in 2006 in Grottaglie in Puglia,
Italy, in collaboration with Le Case d’Arte in Milan. Each unique ceramic has been made and handpainted
in the old potteries factory of the master ceramicist Franco Fasano, a process of making which
also alludes to a sense of homely tradition which Schulze has sought to challenge and complicate in
other aspects of his work.
Andreas Schulze was born in Hanover in 1955 and studied at the Gesamthochschule Kassel and
Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he is presently professor of painting. Important
presentations include the opening show at Galerie Monika Sprüth in Cologne in 1983, and group
exhibitions at MoMA in New York, Tate in London, the Kunstforeningen in Copenhagen and the 1997
Triennale in Milan. In 2010, there will be a major exhibition of his works in the Falckenberg Collection in
Hamburg. He lives and works in Cologne.
For more information, interviews or images, please contact Sally Hough (sh@spruethmagers.com).
Private view: 2 June 2009, 6-8pm
Monika Spruth Philomene Magers London
7/A Grafton Street - London
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm
Admission: Free