About the work

Edouard Beaucamp once described Bernard Schultze’s artistic work as a "labyrinthine system of drawn and painted interior monologues and dreams”. One could hardly describe this unique, incomparable oeuvre, which took its starting point in Surrealism and repeatedly manifested itself over time in proliferous thicket of vegetable forms, in colourful weaves and branchings, in various metamorphoses, more accurately.
As also in this painting from 2002 with the title Auf und Nieder [Up and Down]. Rivulets gush from above over the pictorial area, while colourful vapours appear to rise into the air from the bottom left corner. Everything here is in a state of constant transformation, can already have changed in the next moment; not only the colourful action at the centre of the painting, but also the cloudy, yellowish-greenly illuminated background.
Looking back at several decades of his work, Bernard Schultze wrote in 1993: "Everything relating to internal readiness, to plans, forms according to Breton’s famous sentence: ‘under the dictates of the unconscious’. Each time, full of a spirit of adventure, I begin somewhere on the empty, brilliant white canvas. Perhaps it will be an island of flowers, to then flow into the branches of my ‘interior landscape'.”