Bernard Schultze | Art Store

VAN HAM Art Estate presents "Bernard Schultze"

The offer on Bernard Schultze shows an exciting overview of the artist's oeuvre. Bernard Schultze occupies an individual position in informal painting, which is more indebted to a surrealist "Ecriture automatique", a conjuring up of subconscious pictorial worlds in meticulous work, than to quickly executed action painting. This results in lushly proliferating pictorial worlds that not only overwhelm at first glance, but also reveal a wealth of technical finesse and detail upon closer inspection.

Since 2018, VAN HAM Art Estate represents a large part of the artistic estate of Bernard Schultze. For more information on the VAN HAM Art Estate, please visit the official Homepage. 

The German painter and draughtsman Bernard Schultze (1915-2005) is one of the most important representatives of gestural-abstract art in the second half of the 20th century. As a member of the "Quadriga", he had a decisive influence on the development of Art Informel in Germany in the 1950s, alongside K.O. Götz, Otto Greis and Heinz Kreutz. Works by the multiple documenta participant and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany can be found in numerous international museum collections, including the MoMA, New York, the Tate Collection, London and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Bernard Schultze's early work, like that of most artists of his generation, was marked by the search for new means of expression after the Second World War and more than a decade of National Socialist cultural policy. Under the influence of Willi Baumeister and Surrealism, Schultze initially created two-dimensional colour-shapes, then increasingly small-scale scriptural forms.

In the course of the 1950s, the contours of the forms increasingly dissolved, the influence of French Tachists such as Jean Paul Riopelle was reflected, as was the existentialist-surrealist work of Wols, whom Schultze greatly admired. Bernard Schultze combines these influences with his graphic approach to create labyrinthine pictorial worlds, which finally sprawl out into three-dimensional space through the incorporation of materials.

From the reliefs, full sculptural works increasingly emerge, which Schultze calls "Migofs" and which characterise his work in the 1960s and 70s. Afterwards, the artist, who has meanwhile been honoured in numerous museum exhibitions, gradually returns to pure painting and conquers ever larger formats.

From the 1980s and until his death in 2005, Schultze continued to refine his mastery of the treatment of colour and ductus in daily work, creating an impressive body of work in his later years for which he is widely renowned. Works from this phase were commissioned not least for the furnishings of the Federal President's Villa Hammerschmidt in Bonn and the German Embassy in Washington designed by O.M. Ungers.

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 Barnard Schultze