Andreas Schulze

Andreas Schulze

Born in 1955 à Hanover, Germany. Lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Acknowledgements: Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London, Los Angeles and New York.

Born in 1955 in Hanover, Andreas Schulze’s first exhibitions took place in the early 1980s, while he was still a student at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, where he was a professor thirty years later, from 2008 to 2024.
He has refined and remained remarkably faithful to a style, a vocabulary, and a purpose for more than four decades: his body of work has not been defined, nor has it been resolved over time.
Starting in the 1980s, his painting stood apart—neither Neo-expressionist (a current with which he was nonetheless associated), nor Neo-geo, neither totally abstract nor actually figurative, it was ultimately distant from but close enough to dominant movements to spark a potential dialogue with them. Deemed singular and maverick, his painting has never deviated from this initial direction despite changing tastes and shifting interest in the medium of painting over the past forty years.

The exhibition at the Consortium Museum (the first in France in thirty years) brings together forty canvases (and a sculpture) created from 1982 to the present. Schulze has made two new paintings for the exhibition, taking a particular interest in the large format canvases that punctuate his work. The artist has agreed to forgo the display strategies he often uses (painted walls, non-linear hanging, etc.) in this exhibition, which offers a classic and direct approach to this highly unique painting, in which abstract shapes and colorful surfaces sometimes yield to pieces of furniture, landscapes, portraits, or everyday objects (bricks, cars, chairs—even a chicken!). These elements contribute to the patient construction of a mentally habitable world. Through layering, the work has crafted/fashioned a homogenous universe, where science fiction sometimes meets expressions of contemporary society.

Also reunited for the exhibition at the Consortium Museum are the three large paintings and the sculpture comprising the work Untitled (Polaroid Raum, Polaroid Space), 1982; Schulze’s first installation, now dispersed, left a lasting mental and retinal impression. With its substantial proportions and colorful palette, the work riffs on the memory of Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue (1966-1970) running through its stormy skies, and akin to the ideal backdrop for the music videos that were so popular in the 1980s.

Similarly, the installation Traffic Jam—Schulze’s ongoing project since the late 1990s—has been brought together again. Depicting life-sized cars and hung almost edge-to-edge, this series of canvases creates a frieze evoking the image of an endless urban traffic jam. “Works that seem to poke fun at the fetishization of this industrial product while nonetheless reminding us of the utter necessity of this fetish.” (Sprüth Magers, 2016).

— Éric Troncy