Bringing into focus both artists parallel contributions to the discourse of contemporary painting and their deft manipulation of paint to depict shifting spatial and light effects, the exhibition’s presentation at the Los Angeles gallery highlights the artists particular concern with light and space – a feature so prevalent in the history of modern art in Southern California, from its impressionist, plein-air roots to the reflective plastics and resins of the 1960s onward.

Both Andreas Schulze and Salvo revel in simple things, and reduce everything down to its most concentrated form according to geometrical systems all their own. In Schulze’s new large-scale diptych Untitled (Much) (2025), the artist takes this to a literal conclusion: blue cubic forms emerge from a brown, box-like opening at the center of the composition, seeming to float, gravity-free, toward the viewer.

Each artist, in his own way, tends to collapse foreground and background—a flattening out that can sometimes expand dramatically into physical depths. This mixed sense of space is present in Salvo’s Ottobre (2000): in the foreground, trees sit on rolling hills, shaded on the left, and glowing brilliantly in the midday sun on the right. A trio of houses of varying sizes emphasize spatial recession, as do purple mountains in the background; yet clouds of a similar scale appear both behind and in front of the mountains, setting up an impossible perspective.

Andreas Schulze has played a key role in German painting for over four decades. Like Salvo, he was a participant in the heady artistic dialogues around him—in Schulze’s case, Die Neuen Wilden (The New Fauves) of Cologne’s Mülheimer Freiheit group. Yet he developed his own distinctive painterly methods that balance representation and abstraction, adopting styles derived variously from Surrealism, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism and infusing his scenes of everyday bourgeois life with humor and irony, as well as an intermittent sense of foreboding. At every turn, Schulze both celebrates and defamiliarizes his domestic scenery, urban tableaux and lush landscape views, rendering them strange and absurd through his particular treatment of paint and compositional space.

Born Salvatore Mangione, Salvo came of age as an artist in Turin in the 1960s, home to the vibrant avant-garde scene that birthed the Arte Povera movement. He was close with Alighiero Boetti, and moved in circles alongside Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio, developing his own conceptual practice often with text at its basis. Despite receiving recognition for this work, including participation in Documenta 5 (1972) and solo exhibitions, in 1973 Salvo made a radical departure and embraced oil painting in a style that looked to traditional art histories from Giotto and Botticelli to Italian Futurism and Surrealism. Using bright, contrasting colors that reveal their artifice, Salvo managed to infuse his landscapes and cityscapes with resplendent light effects that seem true to life, if also dreamlike and perpetually still.

Though humans are conspicuously absent in Salvo’s and Schulze’s work, they are usually implied—through Schulze’s twisting forms in Untitled (Dance Dance Dance) (2025), for example, or the domestic architectures and manicured vegetation that populate Salvo’s scenes.

At every turn, Schulze both celebrates and defamiliarizes his domestic scenery, urban tableaux and lush landscape views, rendering them strange and absurd through his particular treatment of paint and compositional space.