Emil Schult (*1946) is a painter, poet and audio-visual artist, whose work spans from drawings and texts in the spirit of Fluxus to lyrics and record covers shaping pop history and to reverse glass paintings reflecting on the human condition.
During his studies at the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, his teachers Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter supported Schult’s poetic approach to the arts. In 1972 Emil Schult started his artistic cooperation with Kraftwerk founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. As artist friends they created the music comic for the album 'Ralf and Florian' and further artwork for 'Autobahn', 'Radioactivity', and additional graphics. Within the next years of their cooperation they also wrote lyrics and sound poetry for ‘Autobahn’, 'Radioactivity', 'The Model’, ‘Pocket Calculator’, 'Computer World' et al. In 1979, Schult deepened his studies of Computer Music at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University, CA, USA.
Since the mid 1980s, Schult works with video and computer animated images and embraces the ancient Chinese technique of reverse glass painting. Schult’s focus lays on the visionary potential of art and his recent paintings reflect on the connection between humans, the electronic microcosmos and the vastness of space.
Emil Schult has recently held solo exhibitions at Osthaus Museum Hagen, DE; Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, NY, USA; Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida South Western State College, Fort Myers, FL, USA; Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, Paderborn, DE; Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, NY, USA; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA. He served as a guest professor at the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University NY, USA. His recent participations at group exhibitions include Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, DE; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; DE, Galerie Buchholz New York, USA; Zhang Zhou International Contemporary Art Exhibition, CHN; Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, DE; Raketenstation Hombroich, Neuss, DE; Tampa Museum of Art, FL, USA; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf, DE; et al.Since 2017, Schult collaborates with Emma Nilsson as TRANSHUMAN ART CRITICS. In 2019, Lothar Manteuffel and Max Dax joined the audio-visual project. TRANSHUMAN ART CRITICS view the evolution of electronic music and art from the perception of enhanced humans. The observations are presented as audio-visual pieces in which the archeological findings merge with the cognition of future.
