SCHULTZE Bernard

Bernard Schultze (Schneidemühl, now Piła, 1915 – Cologne, 2005) was one of the leading figures of postwar German Informel. His work constructs fantastic universes in which painting, drawing, and sculpture seem to generate one another. Organic forms, interweavings, apparitions, and imaginary landscapes emerge from dense surfaces, inviting viewers to explore a reality that does not coincide with the visible world, yet retains its tensions and mysteries.

Artistic Reconstruction After the War

Having trained in Germany before the Second World War, Schultze saw his artistic career shaped by the era's historical ruptures. After the war, he took part in the renewal of German painting, seeking a language capable of overcoming the figurative and ideological constraints of the past. In 1952, he was among the founders of the group Quadriga, alongside Karl Otto Götz, Otto Greis, and Heinz Kreutz, an experience that was decisive in establishing Informel abstraction in Germany.

L'Informalism offered him the possibility of freeing form from established conventions, but his painting cannot be reduced to gestural automatism. The compositions often develop through a slow accumulation of elements, as if the image grew according to its own internal logic. L'The artist constructs complex spaces in which the mark suggests imaginary vegetation, organisms, and structures that elude stable definition.

Migof and organic imagination

Among the most recognizable inventions in his work are the Migof, fantastical creatures and hybrid forms that move between painting and sculpture. They are not characters in a traditional narrative, but ambiguous presences, halfway between natural organism, object, and mental apparition. Their forms can be curious, unsettling, or ironic, revealing an interest in what emerges at the margins of classification.

Material plays a decisive role. Colors, reliefs, and interweavings produce images that seem to grow beyond the boundaries of the support. Painting thus takes on an almost biological quality: it does not simply depict a creature, but suggests the process of its formation. In some artworks, the density of the marks calls for close observation; in others, the impression is of standing before a vast fantastical landscape.

Drawing, Engraving, and prints

Drawing is fundamental to understanding Schultze, because it makes visible the continuity between gesture, imagination, and the construction of the image. In prints, forms can develop with particular freedom, giving rise to patterns that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Graphic production, however, requires precise cataloguing: a lithograph, an engraving, and a photographic reproduction of a painting are not technically equivalent.

Signature, numbering, paper, publisher, and provenance help identify the individual print. His legacy is tied to a conception of art as a continuous exploration of the imagination. Schultze showed that abstraction can generate worlds populated by recognizable yet unnameable presences, keeping the dialogue between matter and fantasy open.