Bernard Schultze
Bernard Schultze (* May 31, 1915 in Schneidemühl, Province of Posen; † April 14, 2005 in Cologne) was one of the great German painters of abstraction in the second half of the 20th century. His early works were destroyed in an air raid on Berlin. In 1952, together with Karl Otto Götz, Otto Greis and Heinz Kreutz, he founded the Quadriga group of artists, the core group of German informal painting.
Lastingly influenced by Wols (Otto Wolfgang Schulze) and Jean-Paul Riopelle, Tachism and Action Painting, Bernard Schultze developed a very personal style of gestural abstract painting. Schultze's works are often described as lyrically abstract. His predominantly colorful and meticulously detailed paintings are full of elements that evoke a wide variety of associations in the viewer. They mostly contain allusions and quotations from nature, are reminiscent of roots, forests and other plants and imagine their very own hermetic counter-realities.
Schultze was a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, a participant in documenta II (1959), documenta III (1964) and documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977.