About the work

Throughout his life, Bernard Schultze fashioned a comprehensive body of graphic works, which developed into a medium enjoying the same status as his painting.
The artist had always drawn since his younger years: "Until 1940 I worked according to Menzel's maxim, namely that 'All drawing is good, drawing everything is better'. Thus I once endeavoured to draw as a meticulously as possible and then, in sketchy rapid strokes, to capture everything I see around me." (Cat. Bernard Schultze "Im Labyrinth", Berlin 1980)
The foundations of Bernard Schultze's artistic understanding and creativity derived from many sources: What he heard, saw and experienced in his daily life, in concert with a richly-endowed visual memory, were reflected in his drawing and paintings. In the summer of 1993, Bernard Schultze travelled to Barcelona in order to have large-format etchings printed by Joan Barbarà's printing house. It is possible that the impressions gained on this journey, lasting several days, furnished the inspiration for these present drawings.
These fours sheets belong to series of 12, titled "Mauri 1" through to "Mauri 12", all executed with coloured crayon. Bearing compositional similarities and each a variation on the same theme, their intensity of colour differs greatly. Together, the alternating dark and light coloured strokes and hatchings generate oscillating structures, poised between vague figuration and abstraction and redolent of deserted shores and cave-like labyrinths. Common to all these sheets, is the rhythmic motion of their open lines and their amenability for interpretation.
The title finally chosen by the artist "Mauri" provides viewers with scope to form their own associations. – Possibly he was alluding to the Catalonia village of Mauri in the Southern French Pyrenees.
(Dr. Barbara Herrmann)