Ohne Titel. 1952/54.
Gouache.
Monogrammed and dated "1952/54" lower right. With an indication of direction on the reverse. On laid paper. 52,7 : 66,3 cm (20,7 : 26,1 in), the full sheet. [NB] Born in Schneidemühl in West Prussia (now Piła, Poland) on 31 May 1915, Bernard Schultze finished school with university entrance qualification before studying (1934-1939) at the Berlin Institute of Art Education as well as the Düsseldorf Art Academy. From 1939 until 1945 Schultze served in the military. In 1944 all his early work was destroyed by fire in an air raid on Berlin. From 1947 Schultze lived in Frankfurt am Main, where he produced his first Informel pictures from 1951. Bernard Schultze developed a highly individual personal style of abstract gestural painting. In 1952 he was among the exhibitors at the Quadriga exhibition mounted by Zimmergalerie Franck in Frankfurt. In 1955 Schultze showed work at the “ZEN 49” group show as well as the Cercle Volney exhibition “Peintures et sculptures non-figuratives en Allemagne d’aujourd’hui” in Paris. Bernard Schultze was also represented with work at the 1957 Wiesbaden exhibition “Lebendige Farbe ‒ Couleur vivante” and, in 1957-58 at the groundbreaking exhibition “Eine neue Richtung der Malerei” at Kunsthalle Mannheim.
In 1955 Bernard Schultze married the painter Ursula Bluhm. At about that time, he started making relief pictures of various materials affixed to canvas. From 1957 he produced what he called tabuskris (tabulae scriptae), which oscillated between painting and drawing. They were succeeded in 1961 by Migofs, a term coined by Schultze for sculptural configurations representing both art creations and natural beings. From 1951 Schultze regularly spent time in Paris. He took his first of several trips to New York in 1964. Schultze moved from Frankfurt to Cologne in 1968 and was made a member of the Berlin Fine Arts Academy in 1972. During the 1970s Schultze again concentrated on panel paintings. He also integrated the Migofs, which had previously been sculptural in character, in the panel paintings he was now producing. From 1974 his formats became larger. The work Schultze produced at an old age is impressive and he kept working intensively on it until just before his death on 14 April 2005. Bernard Schultze was one of the great German abstract painters active in the latter half of the 20th century.
EXPERTISE: We are grateful to Doris Schultze-Berger, Cologne, for her help in cataloguing this lot
PROVENIENZ: Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich (with the label on the reverse of the frame's cover).

Good overall. Corners with tiny pin holes, edges partially minmally bumped. Upper edge with isolated small tears, partly backed. Upper right corner with soft fold mark. Upper left margin with tear, backed (circa 6 cm).