BONN.- Kunstmuseum Bonn is one of the few museums in Germany dealing with the different forms of painting in their exhibition programs on a regular basis. A special focus is hereby put on the American and German tradition of painting, or, in a broader sense, the production of pictures. Under the perfect lighting conditions of Axel Schultes’s architecture, the museum has already realized exhibitions on Robert Ryman, Philip Guston, Laura Owens, David Reed, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Franz Ackermann, Mary Heilmann, Blink Palermo, and others. An emphasis is laid on painting’s relation to space and context while especially in the case of Franz Ackermann or David Reed, painting cannot be reduced merely to the panel in a traditional way.
The exhibition on Cologne-based painter Andreas Schulze takes the same perspective and presents the artist’s work in three individually designed exhibition spaces. Andreas Schulze was born in Hanover in 1955 and has been holding a professorship at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf since 2008. He counts among the generation of artists who rediscovered painting’s sensuality in the early 1980s after minimal and concept art had been pursuing the intellectualization of art for the previous decades. It is exactly this historical rediscovery of the painting that manifests itself in Andreas Schulze’s artistic approach. From 1976 on, the artist studied painting in Düsseldorf under Dieter Krieg and it was during this time that he got into contact with the artists of the “Mühlheimer Freiheit” from whose “wild” way of painting, however, he soon distanced himself. His iconography can be characterized partly by a seemingly naïve and partly by a magical concreteness which already in the mid-1980s he began to transfer into the third dimension. The artist thus creates painterly-plastic environments that connect humor with sordidness.
The show, which has been specially designed in regard to Kunstmuseum Bonn’s exhibition spaces, includes both older and new works. It is being shown in Bonn after its presentation at Villa Merkel in Esslingen and move on to Kunstmuseum St. Gallen afterwards. In his recent works the artist develops an increasingly abstract world made of luminous dots, foggy planes and wavelike objects which in both tinted or radiant colors merge into surreal landscapes and interiors. As it is not only apparent in these works, the artist’s subtle iconography, irony and conceptual rigor evolve into truly memorable paintings.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with essays by Andreas Baur, Konrad Bitterli, Gunter Reski and Christoph Schreier.
