Sale: 375 / Post War / Contemporary Art, Dec. 04. 2010 in Munich Lot 120

 
Bernard Schultze - Die große Migof-Blume


120
Bernard Schultze
Die große Migof-Blume, 1983.
Object
Estimate:
€ 15,000 / $ 16,200
Sold:
€ 39,040 / $ 42,163

(incl. surcharge)
Object. Oil over gypsum, gauze, paper, wire and wood on canvas, laid on stretcher
Twice signed and dated "83". Once more signed, dated "83" and titled "Die grosse Migof-Blume" on verso. Ca. 262 x 162 x 65 cm (103,1 x 63,7 x 25,5 in)

The work will be included into the catalog raisonné, which is currently prepared by Dr. Barbara Herrmann, Cologne.

PROVENANCE: Private collection Germany.

LITERATURE: Lothar Romain/Rolf Wedewer, Bernhard Schultze, Munich 1991, no. 133 (with illu. in colors).

Bernard Schultze was born on 31 May 1915 in Schneidemühl (West Prussia). After his Abitur he studied at the art academies in Berlin and Düsseldorf from 1934 to 1939. His entire work produced before 1945 was destroyed during an air raid on Berlin in 1945. Schultze moved to Frankfurt two years later where he began making his first informel paintings in 1951. An exhibition of the artist group 'Quadriga' in 1952, of which he was a co-founder, in the 'zimmer galerie franck' in Frankfurt included works by the artist. The group's aim was to move away from figurative and formalistic abstraction towards the international avant-garde movements Action Painting and Tachisme. In 1955 Schultze married the painter Ursula Bluhm and he made his first relief paintings with different materials stuck onto the canvas. The so-called 'tabuskris' (tabulae scriptae), works combining painting and drawing made from 1957.

As of 1960 the 'Migofs' followed, those fanciful imaginative creatures that would occupy a central position in the œuvre of Schultze. Since the 1970s his paintings and "Migofs" have become larger and larger, until he made extremely large works in the 1980s, such as this monumental "Große Migof-Blume", in which amorphously defibrated and filigree forms seem to grow out into space. The seemingly shapeless and fissured creatures which have always been part of Schultze‘s painting, leaves the canvas in front of our eyes and thus suddenly becomes a seizable figure. With the "Große Migof-Blume" Schultze presents his idea of three-dimensional painting in form of a excrescent and devouring reality in a tremendous presence.

Schultze achieved an important late work, on which he worked intensively until his death on 14 April 2005. His work has been awarded a number of prizes: he was honored with the title of a 'Titularprofessor' of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia in 1981; he was awarded the ‘Großer Hessischer Kulturpreis’ in 1984, the Lovis Corinth Prize in 1986 and the Stefan-Lochner-Medal of the City of Cologne in 1990. Important exhibitions have been dedicated to the artist's work since the 1980s, for example the extensive retrospective exhibition in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt and Saarbrücken in 1980/81 and the retrospective exhibition of his graphic work in the Albertina in Vienna and other museums in Germany in 1984. A large selection of his works toured to Cologne, Bologna and Budapest between 1994 and 1996. Schulze belonged to the last great names and precursors of German postwar-abstraction. [JS].




120
Bernard Schultze
Die große Migof-Blume, 1983.
Object
Estimate:
€ 15,000 / $ 16,200
Sold:
€ 39,040 / $ 42,163

(incl. surcharge)