Bernard Schultze

The German artist Bernard Schultze was born in Schneidemühl, West Prussia, in 1915, and is one of the most important representatives of German Art Informel. He studied at the art academies in Berlin and Düsseldorf from 1934 to 1939, and then served as a soldier in the Second World War from 1939 to 1945. Almost all his early work was destroyed in an attack on Berlin in 1944. In 1947 Schultze moved to Frankfurt, and in 1951 he created his first Art Informel paintings. He displayed these non-representational works in the Zimmergalerie together with Karl Otto Götz, Otto Greis and Heinz Kreutz in 1952. The four then formed the artists’ group Quadriga. Schultze showed works in 1959 at documenta 2, in 1964 at documenta 3 and in 1977 at documenta 6. He moved to Cologne in 1968. Numerous exhibitions were devoted to him, and in 1980 and 1981 there were retrospectives in Berlin, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. From 1994 to 1996 a show of his travelled from Cologne to Bologna and Budapest. Schultze died in Cologne in 2005.