Bernard Schultze

Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, private collection, Düsseldorf, 2001

All of Bernard Schultze’s works were destroyed in a bombing raid on Berlin in 1945. Like many of his colleagues, he struggled to make a new artistic start after the Second World War. He lived in Frankfurt am Main until 1968, where the artists who took part in the Quadriga exhibition in December 1952 formed the nucleus of informal painting. Schultze’s colleagues in the group included Otto Greis, Karl Otto Götz and Heinz Kreutz. The four artists first encountered original works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and Riopelle in a small, Parisian gallery in the 1950s.
Schultze quickly became very interested in the malleability of the material within the pictorial space. He then created his first free sculptural works and relief paintings, in which he pasted individual details onto the picture surface. The work Am Rande der Zerstörung (On the Edge of Destruction) from 1957 combines collage with painting on canvas: various pieces of fabric and netting emerge from the beige ground, some of which take on the colour of the background. In contrast to this, there are several separate green and red colour sections which are occasionally covered by collaged elements. These superimpositions make it clear that the canvas is deformed and the picture expanded.
Schultze started developing his so-called ‘Migofs’ in 1961. The term initially refers to small-format sculptural formations and paintings which are a mixture of imaginary creatures and natural creatures. Large-format sculptures did not enter his oeuvre until 1992: one fine example, a large Kraken-Migof made of bronze, is also part of the Reinhard Ernst Collection and can be seen on the south balcony.