Bernhard Schultze (1915-2005) - Migof - Gebärden

Bernhard Schultze (1915-2005), Migof - Gebärden, 1968.

Color etching on handmade paper, 67 x 53 cm, signed, titled and numbered.

Provenance: Private collection, Berlin

Condition: Age-appropriate condition. The sheet is overall browned with a surrounding light edge toning at the plate edge. Images are part of the condition description.

Biography
Bernard Schultze ranks among the leading German representatives of Informel and postwar abstract art after 1945. The artist, born in Schneidemühl in 1915, studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 1952 he co-founded the artist group Quadriga with Karl Otto Götz, Otto Greis, and Heinz Kreutz, which was among the pioneers of German Informel.
Schultze’s painting is characterized by gestural structures, intense color worlds, and organically proliferating forms. From the 1960s onward, he developed his characteristic “Migofs” – fantastical, between plant, body, and an imagined being, which he repeatedly varied in drawings, paintings, reliefs, and sculptural works. In doing so, Schultze increasingly crossed the boundaries between painting and sculpture, creating complex, often expansive pictorial landscapes.
With his unmistakable work, Bernard Schultze occupied a central position within German postwar art. His works have been exhibited internationally and today are in numerous major public and private collections. Schultze died in 2005 in Cologne.