Michael Schulze (artist)

"Old Encounter"

"Pursued by Max E in a wheelchair"

Michael Schulze (born February 3, 1952 in Trier , Rhineland-Palatinate ) is a German sculptor , painter , graphic artist , filmmaker , writer , musician and university lecturer.

Life

Michael Schulze was born as the son of the art glass and glass painter Martin Schulze and the ballet dancer Regina Körperich as the third child of five children in Trier. After an apprenticeship as a painter from 1966 to 1969 in the Josef Schmelzer family business in Trier, he began studying interior design with Helmut Berger and Clas Steinmann at the Trier University of Applied Sciences in 1970 , which he finished in 1975.

Since the age of thirteen he learned to play the guitar himself. Until 1975 he played in the Trier formations Holzwurm and Mephisto in folk / blues and rock-jazz. In 1975 he moved to Berlin (West) and began studying fine art and art education at the Berlin University of the Arts (HdK, today UdK) with Wolfgang Petrick and Dieter Appelt in October 1976 . During this time he was a founding member of the "Atelier Kulmerstrasse", a self-help gallery in Berlin-Schöneberg, and in 1976 met his wife Ulrike Sattelmacher-Schulze.

In 1985, after completing the master class examination and the first state examination, he worked as a freelance artist in Berlin and worked on his oeuvre. At the same time, experiments began with animation films in Super 8 and 16 mm, as well as the first autobiographical texts. In 1987 an animation production was created for the broadcaster Free Berlin . He also carried out various art in construction projects in Berlin.

During his studies, Schulze worked as a freelancer for the German Child Protection Association from 1980 to 1987 with children and young people in the Berlin district of Wedding , a social hotspot for child and youth work (music and art). In 1987 he began teaching as an artistic and scientific assistant until 1993 at the Department of Architecture at the HdK Berlin in the field of visual and plastic design under the direction of Ulrich Baehr. In the same year he became friends with the US artist couple Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin-Kienholz , who invited him and his wife to Idaho. This was followed by annual trips, exhibitions and lectures in various cities in the USA , also due to the close cooperation with the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles . In 1990, after the birth of their daughter Lisa Schulze, he lived and worked with his family in Venice Beach LA. During this productive time, the series "Discovery" was created. This stay and the collaboration with the Shoshana Wayne Gallery were interrupted by the first Iraq war "Desert Storm".

Back in Germany, Michael Schulze relocated his studio to the Havelland village of Senzke, west of Berlin, where he acquired and redesigned a small property. As part of an exchange program of the Repin Institute and the HdK Berlin, he spent a three-month study and work stay in St. Petersburg in 1993 . As a freelancer at the Nauen Music and Art School, he led art and design courses for children and adults at Senzke Castle for three years.

In 1997 he was offered a position at the RWTH Aachen , Faculty of Architecture, where he has since headed the chair for plastic as a university professor. In 2009 Michael Schulze was the founding initiator of the association GKG ev., Society of Artistic Design Teaching, where he held the office of Vice President until 2012.

Teaching

Schulze's artistic design theory is characterized by the terms “ concept and work concept”. Based on the generalist activity of the architectural profession, these artistic components are elementary building blocks of his design theory. This pair of terms includes, on the one hand, the conceptual, scientific and cognitive demands that have particular relevance for the formation of skill competencies ( perception , the ability to abstract, conceptual and spatial thinking, intuition , creativity , the gift of combination, originality and poetry ) and, on the other hand, the haptic-tactile demands Requirements for craftsmanship in form and material that are required in the design .

His design theory is therefore subject to different patterns of interpretation than art: Art asks questions, but design should answer questions or: Art can keep a secret, but design theory should be able to disclose its goal in diametrically opposite directions. Therefore he does not assume in teaching that “art” is produced; merely of the fact that artistic methods are used to pursue a design goal. The artistic results are interchangeable and only as good as the objectives for which they were developed. Seen in this way, Schulze understands design as the science of artistic methods, directed towards an applied objective that can be objectified. "Especially in our media world, which shows a greedy tendency towards dematerialization, the plastic design as 'touching the world' aims at a quality of form that the designer should transform into a piece of quality of life." (Michael Schulze: Concept and work concept. The plastic Design in architecture training. Zurich 2012.)

Works

Based on drawing and painting, Schulze developed a conceptual morphological approach to objects and sculptures that include kinetic, mechanical and pneumatic applications. Historical, biological and technical contents find a combinatorial synthesis in the context of questioning nature, culture and civilization as a subjective field of interpretation. Schulze works methodically in topic-related concept and work series, for which he uses different media , formal principles and techniques. In doing so, he pursues the claim of a universal concept of art that goes beyond a 'l'art pour l'art'.

painting

Schulze understands painting as making visible and reflecting real conditions.

Sculptures and objects

Series of works:

• 1980 Pursued by Max. E. in a wheelchair

Based on the time and movement experiences through the animation films, kinetic and mechanical elements were added to the objects. Based on a mannequin, prostheses and other mechanical parts, the first mechanical-figurative series of objects was created in 1979/80.

• 1981 Prussian machine

As a paraphrase of the ruler's monument, a commissioned work for the exhibition “Borussia before, Prussia is not lost yet!” The Prussian machine for the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin was created as a conglomerate of military attributes and Prussian knick-knacks via V-belts. A great assemblage of mechanized history, also thought of as an 'anti-war machine'. The travesty of power and glory as a rattling mechanism.

• 1982 Tacho-Saurus

Working with the work of the French author Raymond Roussel , in particular with his novel Locus Solus , the concept for these animal-machine objects arose, which pursued a quasi Darwinian idea when an animal world was 'reconstructed' by assembling found objects from our industrial society that could have existed after the civilizing age of our present.

• 1984 Allegory of Progress

The image Eisenwalzwerk by Adolf Menzel (1872) was available as a model for plastic generation and interpretation as a pneumatic-mechanical installation in the entrance hall of the TU Berlin as a commissioned work for the exhibition “Future of the Metropolises, London, Paris, Berlin” .

• 1984/85 wing beat

From the knowledge and combinations of techno-organic morphology , methods developed as metaphorical logic in which aspects of reality and reality can be translated in many layers. This led Schulze to formal and reductive considerations, which manifested themselves in the "flapping wings" project. “... I understand it as a search for the possibilities of imagining life in the arrangement of the set pieces of death. In their alienation, the related materials of the mechanical world experience a kind of breath of organic life. A parable ?. "( Karl Schwarz )

• 1986 exterminator

“… But Michael Schulze goes an enigmatic, much more important step further, a leap from which a moment of mercilessness even for the collecting 'animal lovers' becomes clear: It is not about only enlarging and trusting the small, overlooked and trodden It's about translations that will show us that we humans have assigned ourselves that bizarre position: To stand at the most highly developed end of animal history, from which everything will be technology and machine now and in the future. Couldn't there be an authority that is already smiling at this tamer position? Don't the 'electric insect', the 'winged animal' or 'butterfly', the 'electric wasp' tell a completely different story? "( Hans-Dieter Bahr )

• 1989 Look around you ( look out )

In this project there is a concentration of combinatorial methods that are dedicated to the animal and machine, the pair of opposites nature and technology. Similar to the objects of a cabinet of curiosities, there are expressions of a special view and conception that seem to follow their own evolutionary logic.

• 1990/91 Discovery

During the work stay with the family in Los Angeles, twenty-two object reliefs were created, which dealt with the myth of Christopher Columbus and the image of the real 'discoveries' Schulze in the USA: a kind of journalistic-artistic consideration that deals with cultural and trivial phenomena, social peculiarities and pop-cultural impressions as well as historical aspects of the native American Indians.

• 1994 reliefs

Based on painting, Schulze developed a morphological method to assemble found objects and things in a picture context in which the material polyurethane took on a painterly (through the addition of pigment) and connecting role. This resulted in relief panels as a hybrid of plastic and painterly expression. Similar procedures were used with the relic cassette boxes.

• 1999–2001 Eifel layers: The speechlessness of the stones

Drill cores of the Eifel from a depth of z. T. 400 meters formed the starting point for this project (Paleozoic, Carboniferous and Devonian, approx. 380 million years old), in which the fascination of the different sediment layers revealed an unimaginable span of life and transience in nature. The artistic intervention consisted in adopting the sediment process of the cores as an artistic method and interpreting it in such a way that the existing geological stratifications were supplemented and expanded by trivial, psychological real object layers.

• 2001 Eifel stories - animal stories
• 2010 Ethnic reliefs (intercultural aesthetics in global space)

Content-related triggers are phenomena of globalization and tendencies of cultural overlaps and overlapping interfaces, as well as disintegration of national cultural characteristics and identification models. This is an artistic concept that focuses on the aesthetics of national world cultures and is, as it were, revised. This is done through the combination and assemblage of wooden sculptures and objects from the different cultural and meaning areas, which are interpreted via reliefs and woodcuts.

graphic

Conceptual portfolio:

• 1976–1980 Berlin papers
• 1980 stories to build yourself
• 1984 exterminator
• 1986 sketches in zinc
• 2003 animal stories
• 2004 machine storm
• 2005 First in America
• 2006 Constructed Passions
• 2011 woodcuts for the "Ethnic Reliefs"

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

• 1980 "Pursued by Max. E. in a wheelchair", Gallery Kulmerstrasse, Berlin
• 1982 "Tacho-Saurus", Gallery Kulmerstrasse, Berlin
• 1983 Droysen Gallery Berlin
• 1984 “Allegory of Progress”, TU Berlin
• 1986 "Exterminator", Pfeiffenberger Gallery, Berlin
• 1987 “Works from 1977–1987”, Villa Frank, Ludwigsburg
• 1989 “Look out”, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
• 1990 “Excerpts”, works from 1980–1990, Kulturamt Wiesbaden
• 1992 “Look out”, Moody Gallery, Houston, USA; “Look around you”, Körnerpark Berlin; “Machinations”, Zolla / Liebermann Gallery, Chicago, USA
• 1993 “Three portfolios open”, Repin Institute, St.Petersburg, Russia
• 1994 "Reliefs", Galerie Redmann, Berlin
• 2001 "Subordination", Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen; "Eifelgeschichten-Tiergeschichten", Atelier Schwerzfelderstrasse, Roetgen
• 2006 "2 Places", Gallery Einstich and Atelier, Schwerzfelderstrasse, Roetgen
• 2007 "Michael Schulze", 23 m² gallery, Aachen
• 2007 “Dedication Alsdorf”, Art Association Alsdorf
• 2009 “Request for a statement”, Galerie 45, Aachen
• 2013 Phoenix Gallery, Cologne

Group exhibitions

• 1978 Atelier Kulmerstrasse; Founding member of the “Berliner Kunsttage”, Gallery Kulmerstrasse
• 1979 Mannheimer Kubus, Mannheim; Paula Modersohn Becker House, Bremen;
• 1980 "4 master students", Festival Gallery Berlin
• 1981 “Borussia before, Prussia is not lost yet!”, Installation of the Prussian machine, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
• 1982 "Maisalon", house on Lützowplatz, Berlin
• 1983 "Machine room", Gallery Kulmerstrasse, Berlin
• 1984 “Aufbruch”, Bodo Niemann Gallery, Berlin
• 1984/85 "Art and Technology 3", BMW Gallery, Munich a. Berlin
• 1985 "Ikarus", NGBK Realism Studio, Berlin; “Myth Berlin”, concept exhibition, Berlin
• 1986 gallery at Moritzplatz, Berlin; “Schinkestrasse”, Berlin
• 1988 "Material + Spirit", Davis / Mc Clain Gallery, Houston, USA; "Containers", Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
• 1989 “Beyond Words: The Book as Metaphor for Art”, San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum, San Francisco, USA; "Feather, Fur and Fin", Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, USA; “Veksolund”, Copenhagen, Denmark
• 1990 “Woodcuts, Lithographs and Etchings”, Zolla / Liebermann, Chicago, USA; College of Dupage with Chris Sassaer, Chicago, USA; “Exterminator”, etchings, Moody Gallery, Houston, USA
• 1992 “The Robots. Man and Mashine ”, Nagoya International Biennale, Japan; “Kienholz and Friends”, Redmann Gallery, Berlin; “The foreign - the guest”, Open House of Culture Linz, Austria
• 1999 Robert Schuman Art Prize, Trier City Museum (withdrawn after three days)
• 2004 "Take off - 1000 dreams of flying", Art Kite Museum, Detmold
• 2005 “Deep Action”, master student of W. Petrick in the Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin
• 2010 "Update", Association of Berlin Artists, Berlin
• 2011 “Poor but sexy”, Atelierhaus Aachen; "The Library of Silent", Nadiart International, Verviers, Belgium; “Under Pressure”, contemporary printmaking, Association of Berlin Artists, Berlin; "9. Festival de la Gravure “, Diekirch, Luxembourg
• 2012 “I see it differently - thanks to you”, 68elf, Mediapark, Cologne

Movies

• 1979 "20 experimental films", Gallery Kulmerstrasse, Berlin
• 1979/80 “Cinema without a box office”, Arsenal 2, Berlin
• 1980 “Comics and Cartoons in Western Europe”, Gutenberg Museum, Mainz / Lucerne; “Projections 2”, SFB, 3rd TV program, editor Jürgen Tom
• 1981 “27th West German Short Film Festival”, Oberhausen; Osnabrück experimental film workshop, children's cinema, warehouse
• 1982 Ex-Peri and Nix-Peri Film Festival, Bonn; Film days Kulmerstrasse, Berlin
• 1983 Klick Kino, Berlin; T: E: S: A: Film, program block 90 min., Osnabrück experimental film workshop warehouse
• 1985 “Familienbild”, Super 8, 35 min., Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
• 1987 “Hokus Pokus”, five animated films of 2.5 minutes each, SFB Berlin; Michael Schulze, Art is Metamorphosis , A TV film by Ingeborg Euler , ZDF

bibliography

• Michael Schulze: The Forming Process of Assemblages and Objects . In: Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 4, (1990), pp. 371-375
• The future of metropolises: Paris, London, New York, Berlin , ed. by Karl Schwarz (= exhibition: Technische Universität Berlin, main building, October 20, 1984 to December 16, 1984), Vol. 2, pp. 149, 164–179, 271–275.
• Hans Dieter Bahr, Michael Schulze: Machinations, changing tracks between philosophy and art , 1986,
• Catalog: Michael Schulze: Kammerjäger - Objects 1985/86 , Berlin, Gallery K. Pfeiffenberger
• Catalog: Schinkestrasse - exhibitions, with Helma, Christian Hasucha, Karl Ludwig Lange, Stefan Roloff, Irene Fehling, Regina Opitz and Konrad von Homeyer . Berlin 1987
• Mikkel Bogh: Ars combinatoria. Comments on Michael Schulze's technology . In: See um dich, 1989, pp. 5–18.
• Stefanie Endlich about the work of Michael Schulze In: Look around you. Look out, Objects, Drawings, Etchings, 1989, pp. 22–32
• Michael Nungesser: In the footsteps of an object artist , in: See around yourself. Look out, objects, drawings, etchings. 1989. pp. 36-44.
• Look around you, look out , objects, drawings, etchings, objects, drawings, etchings, Berlin 1991, (exhibition catalog: Los Angeles 1989, Houston, Texas 1990, Berlin, Körnerpark Neukölln 1991)
• The Robots. Man & Machine at the End of the 20th Century , Nagoia, 1992, pp. 12f.
• Michael Schulze: Thoughts on the expression and intention of my work "Secretaries" , in: Das Fremde - der Gast, Linz 1993
• Michael Schulze: Assumptions. Machines - Objects - Reliefs - Graphics , ed. by Heinz Herbert Mann, exhibition catalog: Aachen, Ludwig Forum for International Art
• "Documents 02", on teaching in architecture training , ed. from the Chair of Plastic, Prof. Michael Schulze, RWTH-Aachen, exhibition catalog
• Michael Schulze: Concept and concept of work, plastic design in architectural education , 1st edition 2013, 304 pages, format 21 × 26.5 cm, bound, numerous illustrations and photos, color throughout, ISBN 978-3-7281-3481-3
• Ulrich Siebgeber: Michael Schulze: Concept and definition of the work , Globkult 2012 (review)

Web links

• Michael Schulze's own website
• Homepage Chair of Plastics
• Michael Schulze - Discovery
• Michael Schulze's personal page in the museum on the Internet
• Ulrich Siebgeber: Michael Schulze: Concept and definition of the work