Andreas Schulze
Pea Roads
September 18, 2014–January 11, 2015
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Römerberg
D-60311 Frankfurt
Germany
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Andreas Schulze is one of the most interesting German painters of his generation. He creates artificial worlds filled with apparently ordinary everyday objects in his distinctive spatial installations and large-format, vividly colored paintings. Tables, chairs, wing armchairs; potted plants, porcelain, colorful blankets; wooden beams, buttons, and peas—besides the amorphous and spiral-shaped objects, these are the protagonists in his deserted, unreal pictures. The artist, born in 1955, has developed a large-format, extensive new wall painting especially for the Rotunda of the Schirn. Beginning on September 18, Schulze’s Pea Roads will span a total of 400 square meters on two floors. For his new work, the painter stylizes the eponymous peas, which time and again populate his pictures, to roughly 2,000 fluorescent circles whose monumentality and complexity create the impression of being a network of streets from a bird’s-eye view. This impression is heightened further when it is dark and the peas begin to glow—to the viewer, the Pea Roads seem like nighttime satellite images of an urban infrastructure. Applied to a violet, anthracite, white background, the peas appear to flow from one floor into the other like meandering water. The round structure seems to be the ideal venue for Schulze, who often plays with views from inside and outside in his oeuvre and frequently works with perspectives through windows and interiors. In the early 1980s, Schulze achieved national and international recognition for his unconventional and multifaceted style of painting, and he is highly regarded by both critics as well as artists for his cryptic and sometimes bizarre works. His pictures stand out not only due to their surreal and ironic features, but also due to their enormous size and recurring motifs. Besides paintings, he produces entire interiors and combines genres such as sculpture and painting.
“With Pea Roads, Andreas Schulze returns to one of his favorite motifs and interprets it in a new dimension and materiality for the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. An exposed presentation area such as the freely accessible Rotunda is ideal for the purpose of introducing one of the artist’s large-format works to a wider public,” explains Max Hollein, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.
“Over the course of three decades, Andreas Schulze has developed his very own pictorial language. His cryptic, contemplative way of perceiving his environment, which reveals itself in all of his works, is both an invitation and a challenge to the viewer,” adds Carolin Köchling, curator of the exhibition.
Although the paintings Andreas Schulze has produced since the 1980s feature mostly well-known or even familiar objects, their combination and the way they are painted releases them from their conventional function, causing them to lead a life of their own, and they repeatedly appear in the painter’s pictures as surreal formal elements. The eponymous peas are one of Schulze’s trademarks to which he constantly returns. Applied to an abstract background, they become an oversized design element. Schulze borrowed the idea for this new work in the Schirn’s Rotunda from his “Raststätten” (Roadhouse) series from the 1980s on canvas and paper.
Andreas Schulze, born in 1955 in Hannover, lives and works in Cologne. He completed his studies with Dieter Krieg at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1982, and has been professor of painting there since 2008. Schulze does not belong to artists’ groups such as the Mühlheimer Freiheit or the Junge Wilde: he has remained loyal to the ultimate and individual style of his—in part ironic, in part childlike and naïve—oeuvre for more than 30 years, and yet he has nevertheless consistently developed himself within his painterly practice. His paintings, sculptures, and spatial installations have attracted international attention in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Kunstforeningen in Copenhagen, the Triennale in Milan, and elsewhere. In 2010, the Falckenberg Collection honored Andreas Schulze with a large-scale retrospective in Hamburg. In 2014, the Villa Merkel in Esslingen devoted an exhibition to him that will be subsequently shown in Bonn and St. Gallen. His works of art are also included in numerous public and private collections.
Director: Max Hollein
Curator: Carolin Köchling
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T (+49 69) 29 98 82 153 / F (+49 69) 29 98 82 240 / presse [at] schirn.de / www.schirn.de (texts, images, and films for download under PRESS)
