New Objectivity - 921

Narrator (m):

Scholz’s self-portrait of 1926 is considered a major work by the artist but also an important example of New Objective painting. It mirrors the changes to urban life: advertising pillars, ad texts, gasoline pumps, store windows, and automobiles are the associated elements. The appearance of the established bourgeois in elegant clothing can be read as a reflection of Scholz’s new self-image. With his eyebrows raised questioningly, he seems to be astonished himself by his transformation from a socially critical Verist to a professor with a good position and an artist in demand: Scholz had been appointed in 1925 to teach at the State School of Art in Karlsruhe. That same year, he was represented by seven paintings in the Mannheim exhibition.

Narrator (f):

The overdrawing and sometimes drastic depictions typical of Scholz’s work are executed with a meticulous accuracy that is practically unsettling. From the behind the mask of objective tidiness, the “totally ordinary madness” is looking at you. Scholz seems to have been captivated by these rifts so typical of his time. He offers us an almost hypnotic view of the events around him.

Narrator (m):

As in the portrait of the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch by Rudolf Schlichter, the advertising pillar also stands for a modern era and urbane communication in Scholz’s work. Whereas Schlichter placed the posters neatly side by side, Scholz collages them into a babel of scraps of words. The few intact posters disappear “optically” in the curve of the pillars or are blocked by the painter's body: what remains is a Dadaist art pillar in the public space of a city. Polyvocal, fragmented, and loud. The only words that are prominently legible are “dance evening” and “woman.”