Art and Art History Presents Tilo Schulz: November 20

Tilo Schulz Thursday, November 20, 2008
12:30 – 1:30 p.m. Sheridan, Lecture Hall B124 Tilo Schulz will speak on his recent exhibition project I WAS SHOT IN THE BACK currently on view at the Blackwood Gallery, UTM, until January 11, 2009. Schulz’s work intermingles the conventions of art, handicrafts, architecture and design — and queries accepted ideas of high and popular culture. Questions of presentation and representation, of individual perception and the social or political instrumentalization of art are recurrent central issues in his works and exhibitions. The artist, who has also frequently worked as a curator, devotes as much attention to the mise-en-scène of the visitor’s course through the exhibition (of visual axes and spatial sequences), as to the visitors themselves, who are taken into account from the earliest planning stages. Schulz sometimes invites visitors to become agents in his exhibitions, a process the artist calls “activation.” One characteristic feature of Schulz’s oeuvre is his engagement with the formal language of modernism. His interest in the historical debate between the politically instrumentalized art of the former totalitarian systems of the Eastern Bloc and the supposedly free art of the West — a debate his works often critique — is rooted in the artist’s biography; he was born in the former East Germany. Born 1972 in Leipzig, Schulz lives and works in Berlin. Over the past two years, he has shown his artwork at the Secession in Vienna, Magazin4 in Bregenz, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig. Image: Tilo Schulz, homemade (ideology unit_02) (2006)