Andreas Schulze: On Stage

ON STAGE is the title of Andreas Schulze's exhibition, with which he turns Kunsthalle Nue 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 Time and again, the great dazzling world of entertainment coincides with trivial everyday aesthetics, art-historical references collide with banal ornaments and knickknack.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.