Andreas Schulze: Special marks the first solo museum presentation of the German painter in the United States. The exhibition brings together paintings and sculptures created between 1982 and today.
Andreas Schulze: Special / ICA Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. Miami (USA), December 6, 2025.
Although he was never officially affiliated with any group or movement, Schulze came to prominence in Cologne during the 1980s, at the same time as the boom of neo-expressionism. From the outset he developed a highly individual approach that portrays ordinary, everyday motifs while simultaneously questioning the traditional boundaries between abstraction and figuration. The show traces the evolution of his unmistakable pictorial vocabulary: stage-like compositions charged with deadpan, absurd humor. Familiar objects are transformed through wildly exaggerated light gradients and glossy surfaces that recall both studio spotlights and hazy recollections, while also echoing the dream logic of Surrealism and the high-shine allure of Pop art.
The exhibition examines how Schulze turns the banal into something profound through three recurring themes: domestic interiors, landscape, and existential meditation. Visitors are first greeted by large-scale paintings of enigmatic rooms filled with ambiguous shapes, theatrical platforms, and distant views, complemented by amorphous, almost bodily organic forms. These works set the tone for Schulze’s ongoing inquiry into the theater of existence, joined in the same gallery by three floor-standing lamp sculptures that quietly suggest human presence. Further on, sweeping panoramic landscapes appear, densely overgrown with vegetation and strange hybrid creatures whose incongruous juxtapositions produce gently disorienting, poetic stories. A separate section is devoted to the artist’s celebrated car paintings, begun in the late 1990s: generic, oversized, brandless vehicles that are instantly recognizable yet clearly undrivable, frequently belching clouds of spray-painted exhaust in a wry commentary on consumption, interior life, and pollution. Throughout the presentation, Schulze playfully engages with the history of painting, re-animating the flood of images that surround us in daily life.
Andreas Schulze (born 1955 in Hannover, Germany) lives and works in Cologne. Recent solo exhibitions include Le Consortium, Dijon (2025); The Perimeter, London (2023); Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2022); Kunstraum Fuhrwerkswaage, Cologne (2021); Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2018); Villa Merkel, Esslingen (traveled to Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2014–15); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2010); Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren (2010); and Sprengel Museum Hannover (1997), among others. His work is held in public collections including ICA Miami; Deichtorhallen Hamburg/Sammlung Falckenberg; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Städel Museum, Frankfurt, among others.
“Andreas Schulze: Special” is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and is curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, with Amanda Morgan, Associate Curator.
