Andreas SchulzeOn Stage

“Schulze is one of that handful of great names,” Daniel Schreiber sums it up in his text. ON STAGE is the title of Andreas Schulze’s show, with which he turns the Kunsthalle Nürnberg into a stage for his surreal pictorial worlds. Again and again the great glittering world of entertainment meets trivial everyday aesthetics, art-historical references collide with banal ornament and knick-knacks. Bumper to bumper, large-format pictures of well-behaved-looking car bodies crowd together for a photograph on a gatefold plate showing a room-filling traffic jam. Yet Andreas Schulze is leading us by the nose: his pictures of mobility, progress, dynamism and status look almost childlike. The artist has always had a particular eye for the absurdities of our everyday life. In 1989 he still said that the avant-garde moved between two extremes: intellectuality and crude banality. He, by contrast, had always sought out bourgeois mediocrity. With an amused shrug of the shoulders he has been quoting it ever since: amorphous tubes, bulging objects, stylised waves, points of light, misty surfaces and little clouds of exhaust form themselves into peculiar landscapes. Brick walls, velour carpets, standard lamps, rubber plants and all manner of everyday objects are the stage for the familiar, which all at once appears strange and combines humour with a sense of the abyss. For much that at first seems carefree does not in fact represent the visual comfort zone. Andreas Schulze’s pictorial concept is banal and enigmatic, peculiar, and yet, for all its familiarity, it generates an underlying unease.

Exhibitions:
Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 5/11/2022 – 12/2/2023
The Perimeter, London, 17/3 – 1/7/2023