Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Featuring paintings and sculptures from 1982 to the present, “Special” is the first solo museum exhibition in the United States for the German painter Andreas Schulze.

Though never formally part of any movement or group, Schulze first emerged in 1980s Cologne during the rise of neo-expressionism, forming a singular practice to depict everyday life while challenging the conventions of abstraction and figurative representation. The exhibition surveys the range of Schulze’s distinctive visual language, which features tableaux rich with absurdist humor. Schulze’s imaginative studies of the objects around him are enlivened as their surfaces and volumes take on exaggerated gradients, evoking studio lighting and memory, as well as the dream worlds of surrealism and the gleaming surfaces of pop art.

“Special” explores Schulze’s mining of the everyday through the themes of domesticity, landscape, and existential reflection. Viewers first encounter monumental canvases depicting rooms inhabited by mysterious forms, stages, and vistas, as well as amorphous organic surfaces. These scenes introduce Schulze’s philosophical paintings of theater, alongside three lamp-like sculptures that subtly evoke human figures. In another room, the exhibition features monumental landscapes lushly populated by flora and hybrid forms—forms whose various contexts create poetically disjunctive narratives. The exhibition also highlights Schulze’s iconic automobile paintings, which he began in the late 1990s. Unbranded and out of proportion, these cars are comically familiar yet impossible to drive; and often, they expel spray-painted exhaust, a humorous way of exploring interiority and waste. Throughout, Schulze’s paintings make clever recourse to art history as he breathes imagination into the images that surround us.

Andreas Schulze (b. 1955, Hannover, Germany) lives and works in Cologne, Germany. He has held solo exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2025); The Perimeter, London (2023); Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2022); Kunstraum Fuhrwerkswaage, Cologne (2021); Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2018); Villa Merkel, Esslingen (which also traveled to Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2014–15); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2010); Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren (2010); and Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1997), among others. Schulze’s work can be found in the collection of ICA Miami as well as Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Städel Museum, Frankfurt; among many others.

“Andreas Schulze: Special” is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, and Amanda Morgan, Associate Curator.