The German artist Tina Schulz (*1975) is at the Sitterwerk in fall 2018 for two and a half months as a visiting artist. She intends to devote her time spent in the guest studio to open, exploratory work and to drawing. The artist, who was born in Munich, studied visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and spent several years working there as an artistic associate in the media arts department. She employs highly diverse media, ranging from drawing and painting to sculpture, video, and spatial installations. After residencies at the Cité International des Arts in Paris and the Centre d’Art Contemporain WIELS in Brussels, Tina Schulz is now pursuing her artistic practice in Berlin.
Tina Schulz moved into the studio equipped with sheets of paper, graphite dust, and colored pencils. Ever since, she has been letting her creativity run wild with impressive productivity and intensity. As a «door opener» with the aim of becoming immersed in the work process at a new site, she developed her own graphite drawing technique using large-format paper. Working on six drawings in parallel, she allows herself to drift along a stream of pictures characterized by a surprisingly wide spectrum of content and style. Here she is less interested in the individual image but rather focuses on groups of drawings and on the possibility of accumulating this «pictorial row» over the years. The working approach of Tina Schulz is informed by an interest in visual archaeology and consciously draws from the large cultural reservoir of existing imagery, such as Greek mythology, depictions of saints, or technoid science fiction, with the motifs sometimes blending—associatively and intuitively.
Following the large gestures in black and white is a series of much smaller drawings in colored pencil. As opposed to the graphite cycle, which oscillates between abstract structures and fragmented corporeality, here the human figure takes center stage. Amorphous elements, bodily fragments, and colored surfaces give rise to surreal moments—a wholly new development in the visual language of Tina Schulz. What has remained the same, however, is the brisk acceleration, the tremendous creative energy, and the nimble act of drifting from one visual idea to another.
Open Studio
Friday, October 5, 2018
starting at 6.15pm studios are open, with Apéro
at 7pm, talk with Corinne Schatz in context of the mobile discussion platform LE FOYER – IN PROCESS