ANDREAS SCHULZE – TRAFFIC JAM
2014-11-03Andreas Schulze has turned his focus to a single modern design typology: the automobile. On each of the gallery’s three walls hangs a series of starkly colored, larger-than-life paintings of cars. Schulze, who is perhaps best known for immersive, spatially transformative installations, both acknowledges and destabilizes our existing pictorial understandings of quotidian objects.
In the way that a child’s drawing posits a car as the mere sum of its visible parts – a misshapen assemblage of windshields, wheels and windows – so do these works evince little concern for actual automotive design. The paintings’ essential wrongness, paired with their grandiose scale and impassive presentation, effects a Brechtian alienation. These are not depictions of automobiles; rather, they are pictures of pictures, explorations of the rough, indelible images that fundamentally inform our perception of these highly aestheticized machines.
The artist’s painterly act, like functional design, relies on cultural pre-conceptions and expectations. Imagination, invention and beauty occur within a semi-rigid template – a car painting must contain certain elements in order to be recognizable as such. Within this framework, these works accomplish the extraordinary: the self-imposed limitations serve not as a means to snide self-commentary, but as a gateway to an uncompromised artistic purity.
Exhibition runs from November 23rd to December 21st, 2014
Team (gallery, inc.)
47 Wooster Street
New York
NY 10013
