Nora Schultz

CHICAGO (August 5, 2013)—The Renaissance Society presents a solo exhibition of new work by Berlin-based artist Nora Schultz from January 12 to February 23, 2014. The exhibition is Schultz’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, as well as the first show curated at The Renaissance Society by its new chief curator and executive director, Solveig Øvstebø.

Schultz produces sculptural arrangements that double as analog printing studios. Her primary materials are discarded objects scavenged from around her studio and the site of exhibition—i.e. metal bars and sheets, grates, tubes, plastics. Schultz repurposes this refuse into sculptural objects, as well as contact printing devices, stencils and even simple rotary presses with which she prints (often as public performance) abstractions scaled from the intimate to the monumental, exhibited individually or in accumulating heaps. Deeply engaged with material, process and, ultimately, possibility, Schultz’s installations are themselves engines of ongoing artistic creation.

“I’m very excited to present Nora’s work as the first exhibition I will curate for The Renaissance Society,” says Solveig Øvstebø, chief curator and executive director of The Renaissance Society. “The tension within Nora’s practice between energetic process and formal finish will make for a very engaging new body of work, specific to our gallery. Giving an artist their first solo exhibition in the United States, fully supporting artistic production—this is The Renaissance Society at its best.”

Born in Frankfurt/Main in 1975, Nora Schultz graduated from the art academy in Frankfurt, Städelschule. In 2005, she took part in the MFA program at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She currently lives and works in Berlin. In recent years, Schultz has had solo exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt; Bloomberg Space, London; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome and Koelnischer Kunstverein. She has also been included in many group exhibitions, most recently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Kunsthaus, Bergenz; Kunsthalle, Zurich; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; and Kunstverein Braunschweig. In 2014, Schultz will have a one-year residency in New York City from Hessische Kulturstiftung.

Nora Schultz