ART-PRESENTATION:Andreas Schulze-Stau

For his exhibition “Strau”, Andreas Schulze has turned his focus to a single modern design typology: the automobile. A series of starkly colored, larger thanlife paintings of cars. In this series of works the artist investigates the post-Fordian automobile design through a series of paintings and sculptures at the Sprüth Magers Gallery in Berlin.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

In the way that a child’s drawing posits a car as the mere sum of its visible parts, a misshapen assemblage of windshields, wheels and windows, so do these works evince little concern for actual automotive design. The paintings’ essential wrongness, paired with their grandiose scale and impassive presentation, effects a Brechtian alienation. These are not depictions of automobiles, rather, they are pictures of pictures, explorations of the rough, indelible images that fundamentally inform our perception of these highly aestheticized machines. They are works that exploit our collective pictorial comprehension of the car as an everyday object. With a wink and in a nonjudgmental manner, his cryptic pictorial repertoire exposes the previously invisible. Locating itself somewhere between affirmation and irony, Schulze’s painting makes both the traits of our bourgeois life and its blind spots visible. Schulze’s “Stau” paintings are testimony to an extremely distinctive style of painting. In a similar manner to his entire output they possess a unique stylistic signature. In an era of rapidly changing and volatile painterly styles this remains a unique quality.

Info: Stau, Sprüth Magers Gallery, Oranienburger Straße 18, Berlin, Duration: 28/7-29/8/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com