VENICE.- Sprüth Magers and DH Office are presenting the exhibition project Relax by Andreas Schulze in Venice.
The exhibition focuses on his new glass sculptures entitled Relax - bookends shown for the first time - consisting of two glass bricks placed at right angles to each other consisting of two glass bricks placed at right angles to each other and an organic, almost ornamental form on top.
Embedded in his unique visual language, the sculptures, created in Murano, repeat two frequent motifs in the artist's work, combining an everyday object with a seemingly banal curved shape into something unusually harmonious. The sausage-like forms appear in an almost relaxed posture that reflects the title of the new body of work and the theme of the exhibition. The simplicity of the works, the unique combination of rough and smooth textures, dark and light colors, underscores Schulze's interest in closely examining everyday life through idiosyncratic forms that evoke discomfort in the viewer.
The new glass sculptures are surrounded by paintings from Schulze's well-known Vacanze series, in which abstract yet blatantly physical forms indulge in the pleasures of bathing and relaxing on the beach. With them, the bookends enter into an exciting symbiosis of form and content. In their apparent simplicity, they form a strong contrast to the color-intensive motifs of Vacanze. At the same time, however, the curved forms of the Murano glass seem to perfectly match the waves of the paintings, while the bricks, a very common theme in the artist's work, reflect the industrial connotation of exhaust fumes. Schulze extends his painterly world into real space by creating a connection with the brick walls of the exhibition space, elevating the architectural moment to sculpture, making an everyday object the focal point of the space.
Both bodies of work - Relax and Vacanze - combine Schulze's juxtaposed themes, forms and textures to create a tension between the seemingly familiar and the uncannily bizarre.
Andreas Schulze (born 1950 ) lives in Cologne. He has played a key role in German painting since the 1980s. His unique, colourfully visual worlds, which also include sculptures, drawings, and expansive installations, are the result of careful observation of his everyday surroundings. They depict domestic spaces, urban scenes, and lush landscape views, which question the collective social and cultural habits of middleclass life.
His work will be on view in a major exhibition forthcoming at Kunsthalle Nuremberg in November 2022, travelling to The Perimeter in London in 2023. Other selected solo exhibitions include Fuhrwerkswaage, Cologne (2021), Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2018), Villa Merkel, Esslingen, which traveled to Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunstmuseum Bonn (2014–15), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014), Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg and Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Dueren (both 2010), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1997) and Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne (1983).
Group exhibitions include Aishti Foundation, Beirut (2018), Groninger Museum, Groningen (2016), Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2015), Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2000), Triennale di Milano (1997), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1988), Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984) and The Tate Gallery, London (1983).
