Art | 43 | Basel | Unlimited

Andreas Schulze’s presentation is a complex architectural setting, accessible for the viewer to walk through. The artist incorporates floor painting, wall painting, and paintings on canvas, as well as furniture and ceramics, which he has in certain cases found, in others created himself. Schulze’s totally orchestrated environment extends the ideas presented within his paintings into an actual exhibition space. 

The various domestic furniture pieces situate the installation in a congruent zone of life and art. Harlequin lamps with thick, patterned trunks topped by orb-like oversized shades stand at human height, a painted carpet at the space’s entrance functions as a doormat, and large cotton prints of Schulze’s paintings are usable tablecloths. 

Since the 1980’s, Schulze has focused on various interior views of our society. His works often depict tranquil scenes of bourgeois life, subtle parallel realities that examine the relationship between ornament and worldly object. His illusionistic spaces seek first and foremost to achieve, always with humor, an immediate relationship with the viewer, a particular sensory experience.  Deserted, almost uncanny, the interiors convey coziness and menace, familiarity and strangeness, playfulness and melancholy, calm and discomfort.