Collective Memory, 2010, 2010

The starting point is a historical photograph from a Belgian government office, depicting an orderly crowd. Schulze overlays this image with threads extending from each figure to circular fields of imagery: drawings of animals, plants, and natural motifs. In this way, each figure acquires a "pictorial thought" that expands the collective image to include individual spaces of imagination.

The work references theories of collective memory (Maurice Halbwachs) and is reminiscent of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas. A network of order and imagination becomes visible, in which social structure and personal memory are inextricably intertwined.

Conformity and Individuality

The work depicts a group of uniformed men drawn in pencil, their strict order and anonymity emphasizing the principle of conformity. Small badges—symbols, marks, and emblems that lend each person an individual attribution—are attached to the figures via red threads.

This creates a tension between the collective and difference. Individuality appears not as autonomous development, but as an expression of socially predetermined codes. The work thus reflects central questions of memory, identity, and social conditioning within the framework of the Collective Memory project. Collective Memory, 2010.

 Lifeline 1–3, 2024, 2024

The series depicts a branch of a corkscrew willow meandering across the picture plane. Portraits are inserted along this organic line—faces of diverse origins, ages, and expressions. They appear as stations or reflections accompanying the course of life.

The three panels vary the relationship between the natural trace and physiognomic inscription: from iconic, intimate heads (Lifeline 1) to clearly framed pictorial fields (Lifeline 2) to expressive physiognomies (Lifeline 3). This creates a poetic topography of life's journey—not a linear progression, but a network of intertwined encounters and traces of memory.

The work “Flight” (2021) presents a haunting composition: The foreground is filled with silhouettes of reclining or fleeing bodies, reduced to high-contrast black-and-white planes that create an atmosphere of oppression. Above the scene float rectangular fragments of images, like scraps of memory or projected documents, referencing historical photographs of flight, war, and expulsion.

The composition evokes a simultaneity of past and present: The faceless bodies in the lower part of the image act as universal symbols for suffering and loss, while the inserted photographic documents recall specific historical events.

The technique—pencil, copying pencil, and monotype—reinforces the documentary character, while at the same time the painterly reduction creates a distance that compels viewers to engage with the representation.

Thus, “Flight” becomes an image of collective memory that addresses the recurrence of violence, displacement and war – a work that not only bears historical witness but also points to the continuity of refugee movements up to the present day.

SMALL COLLECTORS' COMMUNITY 2023 With "SMALL COLLECTORS' COMMUNITY," Michael Schulze creates a surprisingly intimate portrait of collective memory, captivating in its poetic clarity as much as in its compositional rigor. The mixed-media relief—comprising pencil and pastel drawings on Gaboon wood, complemented by original matchbox covers and aluminum foil—opens a visual archive.

In 48 panels, arranged according to a type case logic, drawn faces alternate with carefully collaged matchbox labels. What at first glance appears to be a nostalgic collection reveals itself upon closer inspection as a clever reflection on identity, memory, and the value of the everyday.

The pasted-in matchbox covers bear evocative names and motifs from diverse cultural spheres—CHHATA, TORI, DE-MANU, PENGUIN—rescuing the seemingly banal from anonymity. The everyday object becomes a symbol, the passion for collecting a cultural practice. The work deliberately avoids hierarchies. A film star portrait from the 1960s stands on equal footing with an anonymous Indian brand image. Everything is treated equally—and thus imbued with meaning.

Formally, the work captivates with its tranquility and clarity. The use of aluminum foil as a background material introduces a fragile reflection—a silvery sheen that doesn't glorify memory, but rather makes it translucent.

SMALL COLLECTORS' COMMUNITY is far more than a nostalgic look back. It is a quiet manifesto for remembering in a time that forgets ever faster. The work speaks softly—but powerfully—about what remains: not the grand narratives, but the small traces we leave behind. In matchboxes. In faces. In glances.

COMMUNITY IN THE MATTER (2023)

The work depicts a paradoxical interplay between the individual and the masses. Faces—emerged from the darkness with pastel and pencil—appear alongside colorful matchboxes, those everyday icons of global consumer culture. The fleeting and unique nature of a face encounters the serial order of things.

Walter Benjamin spoke of the "collector" who preserves the "spark of memory" in things. Here, collecting itself becomes the principle of the work: The matchboxes are images of memory, relics of consumption, while the faces assert the claim of the subjective. Yet both are placed within a uniform grid.

"Community in the matter" means: Community no longer arises solely from direct experience, but from shared participation in things, images, and forms of consumption. Everyone is a collector—the collector of things as well as the collector of glances, gestures, and identities.

The work confronts us with the question of whether a distinctive self remains visible in this serial order – or whether we can only understand ourselves as part of an anonymous collection, connected by the things we accumulate.

EXPERTS

The work assembles faces and technical symbols in a strict grid reminiscent of databases or digital user interfaces. Gears, circuit diagrams, and robots appear among individual physiognomies—symbols of a world in which knowledge and expertise are inextricably linked to technology.

Here, “experts” are both celebrated and critically examined: as bearers of experience and innovation, but also as elements in a larger system that standardizes their individuality. The work reveals how human competence in the 21st century is increasingly embedded in structures of digitalization and automation—between recognition and anonymization, between a living face and functional machinery.

online, 2025
Pencil, nylon threads, keyboard, approx. 150 × 45 cm

The work Online reflects the entanglement of face, object, and digital infrastructure. Drawn heads and everyday objects are arranged across the entire length of the portrait-format panel, connected by fine, transparent threads. A real computer keyboard forms the foundation below—interface, storage, tool of communication.

The faces appear partly familiar, partly anonymous, like avatars in an endless gallery. Interspersed among them are symbols of the present—glasses, keys, cameras, phones, weapons—relics and emblems of individual biographies, but also markers of social roles. The transparent threads make visible what remains invisible: connections, dependencies, networks.

ONLINE
Pencil, nylon thread, laptop keyboard
approx. 1.50m x 0.45m
2025

“Homage to Femininity”

The work “Homage to Femininity” (2024/25) unfolds as a monumental, vertical relief over two meters high. Inscribed within a central, dark trunk are the faces of women—serious, pensive, smiling—emerging from the material like memories or archetypal figures. At the base, strong roots anchor the form in the earth, while above, vibrant red poppies bloom.

The poppy, a symbol of life, memory, and death since time immemorial, here marks the tension inherent in female existence: rooted in the earth, in the physical, in the cyclical, yet simultaneously striving, fragile, and radiantly beautiful.

The work celebrates the strength, vulnerability, and multifaceted nature of female experience. It expresses the idea that femininity cannot be understood merely as a biological or social category, but as a web of memories, roles, desires and resistances that endures across generations and constantly reinvents itself.

HOMAGE TO FEMININITY 2024/25 Relief: 2.05 m x 0.15 m Pencil, acrylic paints on glued paper/gabun wood

The diorama "Giving and Taking" interweaves drawn portraits with three-dimensional elements such as hair, a shell, and a hand fragment. The tripartite arrangement of the faces creates a multifaceted ensemble characterized by intimacy, closeness, and alienation. The objects extend the representation into the physical realm: hair as a trace of the individual, the shell as a symbol of nature and inner life, the hand as a gesture of offering.

The depiction plays with the ambivalence of human relationships: a hand, traditionally associated with care, exchange, and closeness, transforms into a crab or lobster claw. Thus, the gesture of giving tips into receiving, holding into clinging, and protection into threat. The organic metamorphosis of the arm alludes to the fragility of social balance—that what is intended as an offering can at any moment become appropriation or violation.

THOUGHT EXERCISE

The work is based on a historical photograph of children from the 19th century—a time marked by industrialization, child labor, and slums. Schulze transfers this image onto packing paper and adds lines emanating from the children's heads. Each line of thought leads to depictions of modern consumer products that did not exist in that era.

This creates a tension between the documented past and the imagined present. The work explores the overlapping of memory and projection: The children remain bound by the social constraints of their time, yet their thoughts open up to a realm of possibility defined by consumption and the world of commodities. Thought Experiment thus reflects how historical images are reinterpreted and rewritten through contemporary cultural perceptions.

GOLD PROSPECTORS

The small diorama "Gold Prospectors" combines drawn portraits with mineral material. In five narrow segments, encased behind glass, faces appear, their physiognomic features seemingly marked by anticipation, tension, and greed. Along the bottom edge lie pieces of chalcopyrite, an ore also known as "fool's gold" because of its metallic luster.

The work explores the ambivalence of hope and deception. The search for gold here serves as a metaphor for the human drive for wealth and happiness, and simultaneously for the illusion shattered by the shimmering gleam of worthless "fake gold." Schulze thus links image and material to create a space for reflection on economic desires, societal projections, and the fragility of values.

Street Encounters, 2025

In Street Encounters, faces are transferred onto Berlin cobblestones and arranged in a wooden box. The stones, irregularly broken and fragmentary, bear portraits that evoke fleeting encounters in everyday urban life. At the same time, the materials allude to a political dimension: Berlin cobblestones have been symbols of urban conflict for decades, as they are literally pried from the pavement during demonstrations.

Thus, the work connects the everyday and the political, anonymity and presence. The cobblestone becomes a vehicle for memory and resistance, the faces on it traces of individuality within the social fabric of the city. Schulze thereby reflects on urban experience as a network of movement, encounter, and confrontation—between the ephemeral nature of the street and the weight of the stone.

The work "Cobblestones" transfers drawn portraits onto roughly hewn boulders, the kind traditionally used for road construction in the Havelland region. Each stone bears a face or group of faces, distorted, fractured, and simultaneously accentuated by the irregular surface.

This creates an ensemble reminiscent of both street paving and a "gallery" of physiognomies. The title's association—cobblestone and head—reflects the close connection between material and motif. Schulze thus explores the traces of human presence in the everyday material of infrastructure and reveals how urban experience, memory, and physicality can be inscribed in a single piece of stone.

The Corona Frieze is not merely a work of art, but a critical archive of memory. It collects visual fragments of a state of emergency, juxtaposes them, connects them in the flow of lines – and makes visible how crises are inscribed in our collective visual memory.

Trojan Tabernacle, 2024/25

The Trojan Tabernacle combines the form of a sacred shrine with the metaphor of the Trojan Horse. Behind a golden surface with relief-like natural motifs lies a box with numerous compartments. Within them appear portraits of diverse faces, framed like relics, alongside objects such as dried apples.

The work explores concealment and revelation, appearance and inner reality. While the golden facade suggests transcendence and value, the interior reveals a collection of human physiognomies—from serious to mocking—interspersed with objects that embody transience. The apples simultaneously allude to vanitas symbols in art history, to the cycle of ripening and decay, as well as to mythical meanings of knowledge and temptation.

Thus, the Trojan Tabernacle becomes a hybrid of reliquary, image archive, and vanitas object. It opens up a multi-layered space for thought, in which sacred forms, profane faces and fragile remnants of nature meet – a repository of human experience, hidden behind a golden surface and yet always revealable.

The “Winnetou Frieze” (0.29 × 9.50 m, copying pencil on packing paper) unfolds like an endless snake of memory, a ribbon of collective remembrance. The length of the frieze points to the epic scale of the material, which not only encapsulates personal associations but also the shared images of a generation.

The work "Land of Smiles" (2025) combines ornamental and cultural imagery with subtle irony. Faces inlaid in gold lacquer appear against a black background, seemingly laughing or smiling—almost like an ornamental pattern. Fragments of landscape emerge among them: houses, palm trees, blossoms, birds. They evoke an exoticized idyll, as it has been perpetuated in tourist clichés and colonial imagery.

In the lower section, a carved wooden dragon enters the pictorial space—a figure traditionally representing power, protection, and mythical energy, but here integrated into a new pictorial order.

The work explores the ambivalence between surface and meaning: the smile appears friendly, yet also uniform; the golden smoothness is reminiscent of lacquerware, but also of a transfiguration that makes the foreign consumable as a projection surface.

“Land of Smiles” is thus both a tribute to craft traditions and a critical commentary on the mechanisms of exoticizing representations – a reflection on projections, images of the foreign and the fragile boundary between fascination and stereotype.

LAND DES LÄCHELNS
Relief/Collage aus Strohkunst, Goldlack, Holz-Drachen, H ca. 50 cm, 2025

NACHT

„Nacht“ eröffnet ein dystopisches Panorama urbaner Überreizung. Unter glühenden Wolken formiert sich eine fragmentierte Stadtlandschaft, deren Lichtflimmern weniger Orientierung bietet als Unruhe erzeugt. In der unteren Bildhälfte verdichtet sich eine Menschenmenge zu einem expressiven Gesichtsfeld, das zwischen Anonymität und individueller Verzweiflung oszilliert. Der Schrei im Vordergrund verdichtet die emotionale Überlastung, während die übrigen Gesichter zu einem kollektiven Echo verschmelzen.

Beherrscht wird die Szene von einer monumentalen Eule, die als Symbol nächtlicher Erkenntnis ebenso für einen unheimlichen Blick steht. Sie verwandelt die Nacht in eine Zone totaler Sichtbarkeit und kippt die Dunkelheit in Überwachung. So entsteht ein Spannungsfeld, in dem Urbanität, Entfremdung und Beobachtung ineinandergreifen.

Das Werk thematisiert die psychologische Hitze unserer Gegenwart: Die Nacht wird nicht zur Erholung, sondern zum überstrahlten Brennpunkt sozialer Erschöpfung. Die nervöse Linienstruktur und die brennenden Farbakzente verstärken den Eindruck eines Systems am Rand der Emotionalität.

Insgesamt entwickelt „Nacht“ ein dystopisches Tableau zeitgenössischer Existenz. Die soziale Individualität droht im Kollektivrauschen zu verschwinden; die Stadt wird zum psychologischen Brennpunkt, an dem die Grenzen zwischen Beobachter und Beobachtetem, zwischen Innerem und Äußerem, zwischen Sorge und Surveillance verschwimmen. Dass es dem Künstler gelingt, dieses komplexe Gefüge aus Überwachung, Anonymität und Erregungszuständen in einer einzigen Bildfläche zu konzentrieren, verleiht dem Werk eine bemerkenswerte ästhetische und politische Brisanz.

Dr. Pelle Solus

Nacht, 2022, Bleistift/Mischtechnik, H 110 cm

Rooted, 2024 Relief, pencil, acrylic paint, wild carrot, 69 × 51 cm

The work Rooted connects nature and memory in a rich symbolism. Two tree trunks, their bark inscribed with human faces, allude to genealogical lines, to collective and personal affiliations. The roots reach deep into the pictorial space, suggesting rootedness in a twofold sense: as an existential bond as well as a cultural heritage.

A wild carrot rises between the trunks, its delicate structure and colorful highlights creating a counterpoint to the heaviness of the trees. It marks the fragile, fleeting dimension of growth and transformation.

The relief thus stages the tension between permanence and transience, tradition and new beginnings: rootedness appears not as a static state, but as a process that continues in the interplay of memory, nature, and society.

Rooted, 2024 Relief, pencil, acrylic paint, wild carrot, 69 × 51 cm

Communication

The diorama Communication combines graphic line structures with objects reminiscent of technical interfaces. On the glass surface, the image of a power or radio mast appears in white, its network of lines stretching across the surface. Embedded within this are round, glowing blue faces that float in space like signals or message bubbles. Small switches or plugs are located at the bottom, creating the impression of a control panel.

The work explores the technical and social nature of communication: a network of lines, nodes, and transmissions in which human voices and faces circulate. Schulze visualizes how information materializes—between technology and body, between signal and face. Communication thus reflects the ambivalence of today's interconnectedness: proximity and distance, exchange and control, individuality and anonymity overlap in a single visual system.

“Don’t Be a Frog” plays with an idiom that demands courage—but conceals how much this courage is shaped by attributions. The white bust is covered with faces—not randomly, not arbitrarily: The drawings are reminiscent of tattoos, of permanent imprints. What initially appears to be external observation becomes something intimate, irreversible: Strangers’ gazes become skin, an imprint, a history. Not every tattoo is chosen. Some gazes sear themselves into the mind. The frog, seemingly outsider and neutral at first glance, itself bears a female face on its chest. It, too, is part of the system—not innocent, not untouched. “Don’t Be a Frog” is not a call to a heroic pose. It is a space for reflection on identity, on inscription, on what remains—even when one wants to remain unaffected. The work explores identity as a surface of collective inscription: faces like tattoos—applied, indelible, sometimes involuntary. Who shapes whom? Who remains untouched? And what does it mean not to shirk one's own role?

Small Cabinet of Curiosities, 2025

The Small Cabinet of Curiosities draws on the tradition of early modern cabinets of curiosities. Behind glass, drawn portraits are combined with a multitude of small objects: animal figurines, natural specimens, skeletal remains, seeds, and belemnites. Their spatial arrangement creates a multifaceted structure of faces and objects, reminiscent of anthropological displays.

The work explores the connection between image and object, between individual and collection. Each fragment—whether a drawn physiognomy or a found object—functions like an exhibit, carrying meaning while simultaneously remaining inscribed within the whole. Schulze reinterprets the logic of the cabinet of curiosities here: not as a triumph of universal order, but as a poetic archive of human experience in which seriousness, play, nature, and culture are inextricably intertwined.

Collective Sympathy, 2025, 2025

The work Collective Sympathy transfers drawn portraits onto a prosthetic leg. The multitude of faces—in different perspectives, gestures, and physiognomies—envelops the object's surface, transforming the technical form into a collective visual memory.

The starting point is a personal memory: As a teenager, the artist suffered a broken foot and received a cast that was fully signed by his fellow students. This experience of visible sympathy shapes the work: The prosthesis becomes a projection surface for community and compassion, for the interplay of vulnerability and social closeness.

Thus, Collective Sympathy addresses the connection between body, memory, and social bonding. The assistive device—a symbol of loss and replacement—becomes, through the faces, a sign of solidarity. An ambivalent image emerges, poised between medical functionality and poetic elevation, between individual injury and shared experience.

nheritance, 2024, 2024

In Inheritance, Schulze combines the natural form of a dried rapeseed plant with drawn portraits. The plant rises centrally above the picture plane and branches out like a family tree, while faces in circles and speech bubbles populate the relief. The yellow and orange hues reinforce the association with earth, growth, and vitality. The work addresses biological and cultural transmission. The rapeseed plant becomes a metaphor for genealogical lines; the drawn heads embody generations, voices, and memories. This creates a visual model of kinship and cultural memory, linking nature and history, organic growth and social belonging.

Smoking Zone, 2024, 2024

In Smoking Zone, numerous pipes are mounted across the picture plane, from which clouds of smoke rise. Embedded within these smoke formations are drawn portraits—faces in varying moods, from cheerful to pensive. Large, green leaves of the paulownia tree lie between the pipes, resembling islands or lungs.

The work explores communication, transience, and imagination. Smoke connects people, creates atmospheres, and simultaneously vanishes. The combination of pipes, faces, and leaves creates a visual network that intertwines nature, the body, and cultural practice. Schulze reflects here on the "smoking zone" as a social space: half mundane, half mythical, a place of exchange, conviviality, and disappearance in the smoke.

Old Stories, 2009, 2009

The work Old Stories brings together photographs and everyday objects found in a 19th-century landfill in Brandenburg. Glass bottles, shards, cans, and medical containers are carefully arranged and combined with portraits of men, women, and children from different generations. This staging transforms the ensemble into a visual archive of past worlds.

Schulze explores memory as a connection between image and object. The found objects bear material traces of labor, illness, and daily life, while the photographs capture intimate moments. In this juxtaposition, an open narrative unfolds: history appears not as a closed story, but as a collage of remnants and fragments that poetically resonate in the present.

Alphabet of an Unknown Language, 2024

The work Alphabet of an Unknown Language arranges numerous parts of pedicure sets into sequences of symbols within circular depressions. The small instruments—files, scissors, pliers—appear in a systematic arrangement like characters of a foreign language. Through repetition and variation, the impression of an alphabet is created, one that seems familiar yet cannot be assigned any known meaning. Schulze transforms banal everyday objects into an aesthetic system of signs. The work plays with the difference between function and symbol: personal care tools become carriers of an imaginary language that is neither clearly legible nor entirely abstract. Alphabet of an Unknown Language thus reflects the limits of communication—between order and enigma, convention and imagination.

Old Beards, 20211

The work Old Beards depicts a series of historical figures whose faces are adorned with excessively long, stylized beards. These beards, however, do not originate from the figures themselves, but rather trace back through strands to child figures depicted at the bottom of the image as dwarves with fake beards. The authority figures at the top thus appear as "descendants" of these disguises.

This reverses the relationship between origin and imitation: it is not the children who imitate the authorities, but rather the icons of history who derive their physiognomic authority from the play and masquerade of children. Schulze thus creates an ironic genealogy in which images of power are traced back to childlike mimicry. Old Beards reflects on the constructed nature of cultural authority by revealing it as a product of masquerade.

Progress, 2021 Original photograph: Itinerant knife grinder with a grinding cart in Marseille, early 20th century

The work Progress combines a photograph of a wandering knife grinder with a second layer of images that lies over the scene like a cloudscape. Technical devices—mixers, irons, tape recorders—float there, connected by lines to the heads of the figures in the foreground. They appear like dream bubbles: visions of a future that promises ease and prosperity.

Thus, two temporal layers collide: below, the artisanal, archaic practice; above, the promises of industrial consumer technology. In this superimposition, progress becomes visible as a collective imagination—fueled by hope, projection, and repression. Schulze makes it clear that collective memory not only preserves the past but also carries within it the images of a dreamed-of future.

Class Reunion, 2021, 2021

The work Class Reunion takes a historical photograph of the artist's former school class as its starting point. The faces of the teenagers in the lower part of the image are connected by lines to a multitude of older physiognomies in the upper part. This creates a network that intertwines childhood, adulthood, and old age within a single image.

The work explores memory, time, and collective memory. What initially appears to be an ordinary group photo is transformed, through the superimposition of later life stages, into a genealogical matrix. Schulze demonstrates that every childhood figure already carries within it the potential for its future—and that the image of a class is always also the image of a life cycle. Class Reunion thus becomes a poetic study of transience, continuity, and the visibility of life paths in collective visual memory.

Spaces in Between, 2020/21 pencil on cardboard, gaboon panels, pentaptych, inset photographs, 177 × 265 cm, work in progress The pentaptych Spaces unfolds a dense network of drawn heads that spread across the entire picture plane like a stony relief. Empty spaces open between the physiognomic fragments, reminiscent of rocks, scree, or archaeological strata. Behind some of these spaces, embedded photographs appear, inserting contemporary faces into the drawn continuum. The work explores the relationship between the individual and the masses, between memory and the present. The drawn heads appear as sedimented layers of a collective memory, while the inserted photographs inscribe the present into this archive. The tension between fullness and emptiness, drawing and photography, past and present creates a pictorial space that shows how history is not finished, but is constantly reforming itself in the "interstices".

The Informer, 2021

The image depicts a dense, black tree whose branches stretch across the surface like a net. Within this network, portraits appear in rectangular panels—faces whose severity and directness seem to fix them on someone. The title refers to the informer as an individual figure: a person whose single act of betrayal triggers far-reaching consequences.

The branches reveal how a single act generates resonances and entanglements that extend beyond the individual. Thus, the work addresses the tension between personal responsibility and collective repercussions: the informer remains an individual—yet her action spreads like a poison that engulfs the entire network.

Collective Terror, 2021

An oversized spider dominates the picture plane, casting its shadow on a rigidly arranged group of men and a woman in suits. While the assembled group appears composed, the creature hovering above them points to an unspoken threat that destabilizes the structure of power, order, and representation.

Here, Schulze stages the moment of collective terror as a symbol for an experience that is not processed individually but rather affects the group as a whole. The spider represents both projections of fear, the alienation of the uncontrollable, and the fragile balance of social roles. Between the rigid arrangement of the figures and the eruptive presence of the animal, a field of tension opens up in which power, fear, and dependence become visible.

Crime scene 2021, 2021

The work combines a scene of police confrontation—figures with raised hands, uniformed officers, stark contrasts of light and shadow—with the abstracted crosshairs from the ARD television series Tatort. The superimposition of documentary-style representation and iconic television symbol reveals a shift: the real location of the confrontation is, as it were, recoded by the media's framework.

Schulze thus addresses the process by which social conflicts are not only experienced but also produced and interpreted through images. The Tatort logo here functions as a symbol for the power of media framing: it transforms concrete events into narrative formats that simultaneously create distance and familiarity.

Dialogue with Max Ernst, 2021, 2021

The work is based on portraits of Max Ernst taken from film sequences, which Schulze scatters serially across the canvas. In this arrangement, the faces oscillate between individual physiognomy and ornamental structure. This creates a field of tension reminiscent of techniques such as Ernst's decalcomania: a play with chance, imprint, and transformation that multiplies and recontextualizes forms.

The "dialogue" takes place not only in the motif but also in the method itself: Schulze translates Ernst's surrealist strategies of repetition and displacement into a graphic language. Echoing Ernst's own words, "The artist who finds himself is lost," the protagonist here appears simultaneously as image, pattern, and process—never definitively fixed, but in constant flux.

Binary Currents, 2021, 2021

At the center of the work unfolds the structure of a giant hogweed plant, its radial branches resembling a network of nerves or a cosmic diagram. Above, insects—beetles, butterflies, grasshoppers—float, while below, human faces appear huddled together. A luminous yellow stripe marks the boundary and contact zone between these spheres.

The work reflects the idea of ​​“binary currents” as oscillating relationships: between nature and culture, between swarms and societies, between invasion and rootedness. Giant hogweed, itself a symbol of expansion and ambivalence, connects the insect and human worlds into a web of mutual reflections.

From the series MEADOW GROUND, 2023

Blossoms, 2023, 2023

The work intertwines the fragile beauty of the poppy with a network of human faces. Here, the poppy simultaneously represents memory, life, and death: as a flower of summer, as a symbol of sleep, and as a plant of remembrance. The faces appear like inflorescences of a collective memory, suspended between vitality and transience.

Pink Ghosts, 2023, 2023

Dried plants and ghostly faces intertwine to create an image of transience. The delicate pink tones allow the physiognomies to float between presence and absence: memories that linger without being fully tangible. In this intertwining of natural relics and human faces, a collective memory is revealed that extends beyond life—fragile, but not extinguished.

The red line not only marks an abstract boundary, but also separates two collectives—female and male faces. This creates a tension between gender roles, historically established power structures, and the possibility or impossibility of dialogue. The work evokes questions about patriarchy, speechlessness, social segregation, and also the rifts that run through intimate and collective relationships. The line can be read as a symbol of a taboo that must not be crossed—or as a call to question this boundary.

Grandchildren's Sorrel, 2023

In Grandchildren's Sorrel, the plant—tenacious, healing, and often dismissed as a mere weed—winds its way through a network of children's faces. The plant thus becomes an unwitting family tree: robust, unassuming, but persistent. Its branches gather physiognomies that bear collective and personal memories—grandchildren, ancestors, relatives, perhaps even chance acquaintances. The work alludes to the irony that family histories rarely grow in an orderly fashion like a noble tree, but rather sprout like sorrel: unruly and ubiquitous.

MEMORY 1, 2023

In Memory 1, the portrait of an older woman merges with shadowy faces of younger generations, appearing in a triangle above. Stalks of grain structure the surface, while two birds enliven the scene. The work unfolds a multifaceted metaphor for memory: personal history and collective memory overlap, supported by natural symbols such as grain and bird. The interplay of physiognomic fragments and botanical elements creates an atmosphere poised between transience and permanence.

Memory 2, 2023, 2023

The faces in the bubble appear like preserved fragments of past loves, relationships, and encounters. They seem lighter, detached, almost as if in a floating capsule—safe, yet also unattainable. The young head in the lower section, mirrored many times, gazes upward: a counterpart that invokes the past, questions it, perhaps even idealizes it.

Thus, the image could be interpreted as a reflection on personal memory: women as the embodiment of former intimacy, but also as unattainable figures who become ghosts in memory.

Explosion, 2023

Explosion combines floral symbolism with the immediate visual language of political violence. At its center unfolds the dried flower of ornamental onion, its radial structure reminiscent of the shockwave of a detonation. Faces expressing horror, pain, and terror are grouped around this vegetal center.

The background depicts destroyed houses in Gaza, explicitly anchoring the work in the present: in the context of Hamas's attack on Israeli civilians and Israel's subsequent attacks on the Gaza Strip. Schulze interweaves individual physiognomies, natural motifs, and urban ruins into an image of collective suffering. Beauty and catastrophe overlap, making the explosion perceptible not only as an act of physical annihilation but also as a fragmentation of memory and community.

Flaming Grass, 2023

In Flaming Grass, the motif of the landscape intertwines with collective expressions of horror. A blazing movement seems to erupt from the vertically rising grasses and the central ornamental onion blossom, permeating the entire picture plane. The faces filling the upper space are frozen in screams, open mouths, and horrified stares—physiognomies that appear to have sprung from a single eruptive gesture.

The work can be interpreted as a cipher for natural disasters such as the devastating fires in California, but it connects ecological threat with universal registers of human fear. The vegetation transforms into flames, the blossom into an explosive center, making collective trauma visible in both the natural and human memory.

Fragile Relationships, 2023, 2023

The composition arranges female and male physiognomies on the left and right, respectively, framing the central insect wings. A delicate, fragile web stretches between the two groups, symbolizing the idea of ​​relationship, difference, and approach.

The delicate wings mark a balance between closeness and distance, between protection and vulnerability. The image thus becomes a metaphor for the fragile interplay of the sexes, suspended between connection and separation. The use of plant material reinforces this impression: nature here functions as a resonating chamber for human sociality, where balance must be constantly renegotiated.

Contrasts, 2023

The composition unfolds as a tripartite arrangement that evokes a vertical polarity. At the top, faces appear in vibrant colors, radiating peace, dignity, or serenity—a sphere that can be associated with the idea of ​​heaven. Below, distorted physiognomies, marked by fear, pain, and cries of anguish, crowd together in stark black and white contrast—a visual echo of the iconography of hell.

Between these two poles lies a white field with blue, vertical lines. This intermediate realm is ambivalent: it can be interpreted as rain, a stream of tears, or a permeable veil marking the transitions between transcendence and the abyss.

Schulze's work thus transforms the motif of "heaven and hell" into a contemporary allegory. It places man in the tension between existential opposites and makes visible how close exaltation and despair, hope and downfall are to each other.

Collective Faces, 2023

In Collective Faces, Michael Schulze condenses the motif of memory in a multi-layered superimposition of images of nature and people. On the right, numerous physiognomies form a dense, almost floating cloud: laughing, serious, shouting, turned away. They appear as a visual condensation of collective experience, oscillating between intimacy and anonymity.

In contrast, on the left, grasses, rendered in relief and tactilely palpable, ground the work. Nature appears here as a counterpoint to the fleeting nature of the faces—as a constant, albeit fragile, medium that stores and simultaneously overlays memories.

Schulze's composition thus unfolds within the tension between the individual and the community, transience and permanence. The title suggests an ambivalence: the collective here is not just an anonymous mass, but also a network of individual fates whose traces seem to be anchored in nature.

Grasshopper, 2023, 2023

In Grasshopper, Michael Schulze combines organic materials with drawn faces to create a reflection on memory, nature, and transience. The vertically arranged grasses form a kind of vegetative ground that simultaneously evokes a system of notation: lines that establish rhythm and order, yet are characterized by random proliferation.

Above this layer unfolds a dense assembly of human physiognomies. Their diversity of emotions—ranging from skepticism and seriousness to quiet observation—congeals into a collective memory that hovers like a cloud above the pictorial space.

The title Grasshopper opens up a metaphorical dimension: it refers not only to the habitat of the depicted plants but also to the volatile nature of human memory, which is never linear but always fragmentary and fluid. In biblical and literary tradition, the grasshopper also appears as a symbol of the ephemeral, of that which is exposed to the wind—an emblem of the fragility of human existence in the flow of history.

Thus, the image becomes a poetic condensation: the plants as an archive of time, the faces as fragile echoes, the title as a reference to the transience of all life.

Warm – Cold, 2023

The work Warm – Cold derives its power from a clear opposition: on the left, the orange area, associated with warmth and closeness; on the right, the blue, traditionally representing distance, coolness, or defensiveness. Faces are inscribed in both zones—laughing, marveling, questioning, or shouting—which are less individual portraits than expressions of a collective spectrum of human experience.

The three-dimensional ornamental allium blossoms in the center act as fragile mediators between the two poles. They are reminiscent of dandelions, their seeds carried by the wind—a symbol of permeability and transformation, of the possibility of transcending boundaries.

Psychologically, the composition evokes the contrast between empathy and coldness, between openness and isolation. Schulze makes visible how quickly social spaces can disintegrate into camps—into an "us" and a "them." It is precisely in the context of racism and exclusion that the work unfolds its political dimension: it reminds us that the boundary between warmth and cold is not natural, but a human construct—and that it can be breached at any time.

Thus, Warm – Cold becomes an image of the fragility of humanity: of the risk of succumbing to emotional and social stagnation, and of the hope that empathy will be carried on like a seed.

Exchange of Opinions, 2023

In "Exchange of Opinions," numerous faces coalesce into an image of agreement, disagreement, and irritation. The button flower permeates the network, connecting and separating simultaneously—a symbol for the organic, often contradictory interconnectedness of thoughts.

The title plays on ambivalence: exchange can signify understanding, but also conflict or the coexistence of irreconcilable positions. The work thus alludes to the fragility of public communication in a time of increasing polarization—a network that can tear at any moment.

Mothers of the Earth, 2023

In Mothers of the Earth, faces emerge from an earthy structure, framed by the fragile stems of horsetail. The combination of human faces and plant forms evokes the image of an ancient symbiosis: nature as a nourishing matrix, humans as part of a collective, earth-bound memory.

The “mothers” appear both vulnerable and persistent—a silent metaphor for origin, rootedness, and humanity’s indissoluble dependence on the earth.

On Silence, 2023, 2023

In horizontal layers, faces appear, their mouths missing—depersonalized countenances that, through their silence, appear both anonymous and oppressive. From the lower section, a single figure emerges, half-hidden by the grasses, like a silent witness between nature and memory.

The absence of mouths alludes to silence as a loss of expression and communication. This silence, however, is not neutral: it can represent repression and speechlessness, but also resistance to the unspeakable. At the same time, a social subtext resonates—the concealment of guilt, the tabooing of experience, the censorship of voices. Thus, the work addresses the fragility of memory and public discourse in a time when silence can be as politically as it is personally effective—and dangerous.