Andreas Schulze: On Stage Cat. Kunsthalle Nuremberg

ON STAGE is the title of Andreas Schulze’ s exhibition, with which he turns Kunsthalle Nü rnberg into a stage for his surreal visual worlds. Time and again, the great dazzling world of entertainment coincides with trivial everyday aesthetics, art-historical references collide with banal ornaments and knickknack. Large-format images of neat-looking car bodies jostle bumper to bumper for a photograph for a folding panel of a room-filling traffic jam. But Andreas Schulze is taking us for a ride; his images of mobility, progress, dynamism, and status look almost childlike. The artist has always had an eye for the absurdities of our everyday lives. In 1989, he still said that the avant-garde moved between two extremes: intellectuality and crude banality. He, on the other hand, has always sought a bourgeois mediocrity. He has since been quoting it with an amused shrug: amorphous tubes, bulging objects, stylized waves, points of light, misty areas, and little clouds of exhaust gas arrange themselves in peculiar landscapes. Brick walls, velour carpets, floor lamps, rubber trees, and all manner of everyday objects are the stage for the familiar, which suddenly appears strange and combines with humor and inscrutability. After all, much that at first seems carefree does actually not represent a visual feel-good place. Andreas Schulze’ s pictorial concept is banal and enigmatic, peculiar, yet despite all its familiarity it does evoke a subliminal sense of unease.

Andreas Schulze, born in Hanover in 1955, lives and works in Cologne. He has been a professor at Kunstakademie Dü sseldorf since 2008. He belongs to the generation of artists who in the 1980s explored the field of painting and were sweepingly referred to as the “ Neue Wilde” (The New Fauves). They saw their frame of reference in the radicalism of the punk attitude of the period. Andreas Schulze belonged to this scene, but clearly distanced himself from any expressive, spontaneous, and subjective style. Harriet Zilch (born 1976), art historian, has been director of the Kunsthalle Nuremberg since 2022. She has curated numerous exhibitions and written catalog articles on international artists, including Mathilde der Heijne, Stephan Balkenhol, Silvia Bä chli, Alicja Kwade and others. Daniel Schreiber, born in 1977, is a German non-fiction author of a Susan Sontag biography “ Geist und Glamour” (2007) and the highly acclaimed and widely read German essays “ Nü chtern” (2014), “ Zuhause” (2017), and the bestseller “ Alone” (2021 German original edition; English edition will be available at Reaktion Books). He lives in Berlin. “ At 40, Alex Petalas appears more seasoned than your average older-millennial collector. Thanks to his family’ s shipping business, the Swiss-Greek qualified solicitor has been buying art since his late 20s. He opened The Perimeter in 2018, a non-profit, private art space in a renovated Bloomsbury mews house where he stages two exhibitions a year based around his collection,” writes the The Art Newspaper in October 15, 2021.