Dorothea Schulz

If art is communication, then Dorothea Schulz can in good conscience be called it’s master. The artist uncovers etymologies, finds pleasure in barroom chat and in insults, and discovers the Last Judgment both in pubs and in the institutions of the federal judiciary.

For about ten years now, Dorothea Schulz has been occupied primarily with questions of understanding and communication, with listening and its visual processing. Her so-called listening drawings are created, in a sense, from the ear to the hand; the artist produces them during conversations she overhears or in which she takes an active part herself. Snatches of language are mixed with small, sometimes grotesque-looking figurative drawings to create documents of spoken language that expose both the everyday use of language and its associative processing in the act of communication.

In addition, she produces court drawings and monumental rolls of paper that illustrate the babble of voices of a crowd of people. Image and text, speaking, and understanding take on almost cacophonic dimensions, familiar, for example, from the late medieval depictions of hell by the likes of Hieronymus Bosch.

Dorothea Schulz has become familiar to a wider audience at least since participating in the exhibition Funny Cuts (2004) at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. But even before that, she had secured her place in the German and European drawing scene.