Bernard Schultze

The graphic works become paintings, and the paintings become labyrinths of nature. Bernard Schultze, one of the most important contemporary artists.

About Bernard Schultze's Work

The story reaches far back in time. They were called the Neo-Romanticists at the time. In his early phase, from 1956 to the 60's, Bernard Schultze developed a gradually relief-like deformation of matter which led to the creation of the 'Migofs'. The filigree, lace-like qualities are characteristics of these plastic embodiments and slag-like rudiments. They have fallen out of their color dream. First hesitantly, then with fresh energy, they stepped out of the surface of the painting and became color installations. That caused a sensation. It determined the 60's and 70's. After 1972, he returned to panel painting. With grisaille, graphic aspects were brought into the foreground. Shading, tones of gray and perspective gradually took the upper hand. Reference to the Classics was perceptible. In the mid-80's, the format became larger, more generous, with works measuring more than two meters. It may thus be surprising that Schultze and his wife share only a small room as their studio. He works in one corner and she in the other. The Cologne studio seems to be cut out for small formats, but this is deceiving. The extent of his large series of painting only becomes evident at exhibits. Schultze paints in series.

Bernard Schultze is considered, along with Emil Schumacher or K.R. H. Sonderborg, as a principle figure of german Informal Art. Today Schultze is over 80 years old. If we consider the entirety of his work, the realization dawns that it is enormous. With the exception of his beginnings, there are no great breaks or changes in direction. His process of creation resembles the paintings, flowing, moving on. His plastic works practically step out of the painterly intertwining mesh. In addition to the pictorial labyrinth of consciousness and sensibility, he also has a poetic vein, as free of punctuation as his painting.

In the post-war period Schultze began dabbling in non-figurative art through his technique, yet it is clear that he had not completely broken with the past. He was concerned with an alternation between Informal Art and Impressionism. Interesting too, how close he came in his formal search to the figurative Expressionist. He perceptibly reacts to the figurative - as if a transformation or translation of nature or of traditional art were taking place. Its as if the painter were decoding in secret the compositions of the ancient masters, the painterly superstructures of Mannerism and the Renaissance, as if seeking a solution for his own abstract - a consistent search which leads him to become an unmistakable contemporary artist with international renown. His rich gradation of greens, his tones of red and yellow are popular. Painting is 'iridescent under the imagination and combination theory of Schultze. There is a visual romance hidden in it as well'. The great honor of an exhibit with catalogue at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne is only one of his many achievements.

His 'constellations' and preoccupation with contemporary art was pathbreaking. His meeting with Ursula Bluhm in 1949 opened a new phase in his life. His marriage to the artist brought a lasting interchange. The breakthrough to his own artistic language followed in the 50's. Tachism appears in full force and is also perceptible in his later work. His art, at first Surreal, then Informal, Expressionist and Baroque, is in all phases a volume-building movement of whirlwinds, tunnels and moss growth. The subconscious becomes the program director early on: from the sculptural elements fixed onto the painting surface to the relief painting made of paper, cardboard, cloth, cork, bark, straw, string, thread, pipes and string constructions to the free plastic paintings, the 'Tabuskris' (Tabulae scriptae). The 'Migof' paint sprites have their story of how they came about. The crackling, the ripping and splintering of the panel paintings and the running paint at some time gained a figurative aspect and became the medium of creation. His dream of the interdisciplinary work of art became reality in his 'environments' of the 60's. Among these are 'Die mythische Höhle des Universums' (The Mythical Hell of the Universe), the 'Migof Labyrinth', the 'Mannequin-Migof', as well as the set for Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons' for the opera house of Düsseldorf (1970) - enormous Migofs dangling high in the theatre. In the 80's he creates the work 'Saurier Bergsturz im Licht' (Dinosaur Hiking Round the Mountain in Light), a painting in a format of over 2 x 2 meters, oil on canvas with plastic elements. The 'Migof' bodies of color had hidden themselves at some point back in the painting. The surface had then fetched them back, and as if to take leave, in the 'Trümmer Migof' (Rubble Migof) from 1982-85, embodying the forest light of interior monologue.

Kubin and Ensor's art fascinated Schultze already in the 40's, although their imaginative freedom seemed to Schultze then as a sin. He was still feeding on 'Altdorfer's obsession with detail' and the Baroque of Tiepolo and Rubens. Art criticism can explain Schultze's colorfulness by referring to Grünewald or Altdorfer, and so the influence is evident, the formal reference given. Schultze does not refute the 'ancestral origins of his painting'. He names above all Ensor's 'Ascension of Christ', a painting which for him had always stood for 'teeming wholeness'. 'A rushing and swaying is perceptible to the outer limits of the painting', Schultze says today of one of his latest paintings, 'an uninterrupted metamorphosis - that is what my paintings attempt to express.' And so we arrive at the musicality of universal observation through light and cloud phenomena, characteristics shared by Bernard Schultze's entire paintings and graphic work. ek