Rose Schulze

Rose Schulze studied painting at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee from 1972 to 1977, particularly with Johannes Richter and Heinrich Tessmar. She was also a masters fellow at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. She has lived as an independent artist since 1979.

eStarting in 1984, Schulz expanded her artistic practice beyond painting to other artistic media. In  her work, she increasingly integrated elements from the media of photography, performance, music, dance and installation into her painting and graphic art works. She has developed multimedia works in collaboration with composers and dancers, herself contributing choreography, screen projections, and light installations. Her collaborators on these complex projects have included Georg Katzer, Helmut Zapf, Lothar Voigtländer, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Yueang Wang, as well as dancers Christof Gräter, Roselle Gillam, and the international ensemble Grotest Maru.

Her projects have been presented at the world fairs of Seville and Hannover, at the opening of the new Akademie der Künste in Berlin, at the Biennale for Visual Art in Varna and at many other venues. In her series Zu Maxie Wander from 1985, Schulze used the graphic medium to stake out a response to the book Guten Morgen, du Schöne. Protokolle nach Tonband (Good Morning, My Lovely. Protocols of a voice recorder) by writer Maxie Wander, which first appeared in 1977 and became a cult classic in both East and West. Wander’s book involves a literary re-working of the record of conversations with 19 women, who talk about themselves and their feelings, their families, their work, and the men they live with. They talk about love and sexuality, about politics, about their life philosophies. In her homage to the Austrian writer, Schulze draws our attention to the relationship between text and image and to the way in which every moment is only an excerpt from a larger whole.

In 1993, Schulze was awarded the working grant of the Stiftung Kulturfonds, in 1995 another from the Ministery of Science, Research, and Culture of the Land Brandenburg, and in 1996 won the Brandenburg Prize for Visual Art. She acted as chairman of the Verband Bildender Künstler of Brandenburg from 2002 to 2006, and remains today a powerful voice in the mediation of art and culture.

text: Elke Neumann, translation: Darrell Wilkins