Schultze, Bernard

Bernard Schultze was born on 31 May 1915 in Schneidemühl/Pila (Poland). In 1921 the family moved to Berlin. 1934 Prinz Heinrich Gymnasium Berlin, Abitur. 1934-1939 College of Art Education Berlin, then Düsseldorf Academy of Art. Drawing skills are cultivated above all. 1939-1945 Soldier in Russia and Africa. His early oeuvre is destroyed in the war in 1944. 1947 moves into his studio in Frankfurt. 1945-1947 refugee in Flensburg, moves to Frankfurt a.M.; meets Nolde. 1951 first informal works. Exhibition of 'New Expressionists'; 1952 Quadriga, connection to international Action Painting, Lyrical Abstraction and Tachism. 1951 meeting with Wols. Colleagues in the Frankfurt Quadriga are Götz, Greis and Kreutz, they are called the New German Romantics and proclaimed as Tachists - like Vedova or Burri in Italy. Meeting with representatives of the Cobra Group. The 'panning in the paint' becomes part of the painterly procedure, the materials are colour powder, wood. Marriage in 1955 to Ursula Bluhm. Schultze combines his expressive understanding of colour with material effects. From this he creates pictorial objects that break away from the painting, his Migofs made of wire, plastic mass, wood, painted canvas. Of equal importance is Schultze's oeuvre of drawings. Since the 1970s, colour has taken on an expressive life of its own, becoming an abstract pictorial reality that at the same time evokes a dramatic pictorial romanticism. The automatisms and scribbles of the stroke become increasingly important in his late work and manifest themselves together with the colour-spatial constructions. The prints are influenced by this and become the quintessence of this painterly work. Schultze is one of the most important contemporary painters in Germany. Today Bernard Schultze maintains a studio in Cologne together with his wife, who is also a painter. This biography is subject to copyright. (c) Evi Kliemand, 1998. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of the author.