Andreas Schulze
Flowers & Landscapes
June 3–August 28, 2009
London

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.