Martin Schuster: Contemporary Painting Between Potsdam and Leipzig
Martin Schuster treats painting as a constructed space: scenes assembled with care, color carrying the mood, images reading as sets rather than snapshots.
Exhibitions in Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy map a steady arc, from Disco Apocalyptic and Wonderful Realism to Freed from Desire and Ancient Alien Structures, each testing how much narrative a painted set can hold.
Visibility beyond the gallery includes presentations with Positions Berlin and KunstRAI Amsterdam, which helped place the work in a wider conversation. Works are held by the Bayer Collection and the MdbK Leipzig.
Potsdam Roots, Leipzig Focus
Born in Potsdam in 1986 and based in Leipzig, he studied at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design and completed a study period at the University of Fine Arts, Hanoi.
Martin Schuster: On the left: Blue Horse, 2020 and on the right: Bushaltestelle Podelwitz 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.
These paths shaped his sense for provisional surfaces and deliberate structure, pictures built rather than found.
Early support came through the Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Saxony-Anhalt Arts Foundation, with catalog funding in 2020, which underpinned production and exhibition momentum.
Martin Schuster: On the left: Kunstraum Ortloff 2021. Foto Jacob Adolphi and on the right: Feinkunst Krüger 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
Play, Then Aftertaste
At first glance the paintings look playful: party fragments, travel signs, toy architectures, cartoon fauna, bright skies.
Look longer and the tone shifts. The work asks how desire and consumption shape feeling, placing pleasure and fatigue in the same frame without turning the image into a lesson.
Martin Schuster: On the left: Selbstbildnis als glücklicher Freilichtmaler. Foto Tom Dachs and on the right: Süße Farm, Foto Tom Dachs. Image courtesy of the artist.
Schuster frames this as an invitation to play that still keeps a diagnostic edge, often setting scenes in futures that reveal themselves as the present.
Martin Schuster: On the left: Freed from desire, 2023 and on the right: Okolyt with Real Estate painting. Foto Tom Dachs. Image courtesy of the artist.
Simultaneity, Plainly Stated
A core idea is simultaneity. Joy and doubt appear together.
Retreat and excess sit side by side. Beauty and waste share the same image.
He names that mix directly in his notes on the work, describing worlds where pleasure, reason, greed, and thrill coexist without tidy resolution.
The canvases hold this range without forcing a single reading, giving room to think as well as look.
Everyday language, Built Space
The visual vocabulary comes from common culture: old video game design, music-video glow, plastic toys, graffiti, comics.
Depth and flatness alternate within a single scene, as if the viewer were moving through a set.
You recognize the parts, yet the arrangement stays alert and exact.
The stage-setting approach is explicit in how he describes his process and is consistent across bodies of work.
Materials, Objects, Pacing
Schuster works primarily in painting. Layers build the image like a structure, not a gesture.
Edges stay clean where they carry meaning, and atmosphere sits where it needs to so the picture reads clearly and still holds tension.
Exhibition hangs often underscore the set logic, placing works so they read as adjoining scenes rather than isolated canvases.
Martin Schuster: Together, 2024, Foto Tom Dachs. Image courtesy of the artist.
Alongside the canvases he produces objects and installations that extend this stage feeling into space: modular cube sculptures with pixel-pattern surfaces that echo the Real Estate logic, wooden paired animal forms from 2024, and site projects such as FREMDTEILCHEN and the Podelwitz bus stop wall painting.
The same vocabulary carries across media: constructed surfaces, clear color, and set-like placement translated from picture plane to room.
Position Without Quotation
References are clear: post-internet image habits, stage design, pop graphics.
The position remains his own.
He treats culture as shared ground rather than material to quote from a distance, using familiar signs to register less familiar feelings.
Group shows in Leipzig, Hamburg, Eindhoven, Florence, and Potsdam have placed this language alongside varied European contexts, which clarifies how his images operate beyond local scenes.
Why This Work Matters Now
These pictures offer a workable view of contemporary life without melodrama. They neither celebrate spectacle nor scold it.
They study how we live among screens, products, and planned fun, with steady attention to color, form, and pacing.
The work also acknowledges a need for places of retreat and holds a grounded optimism that things continue, even when the world feels overfull.
Martin Schuster shows frequently with Galerie Nasty Alice in Eindhoven, with shows such as Shifting Times (2025, with Mariëtte van Erp), Fantasia(2022), and Land of Glory (2019), alongside fair presentations with Positions Berlin and KunstRAI Amsterdam.
Selected exhibitions include Freed from Desire C. Rockefeller Center, Dresden, 2023), Ancient Alien Structures(ARS Avanti, Leipzig, 2023), and Sind wir bald da? (galerie intershop, Leipzig, 2020).
Stay close. If these toy ruins and radiant skies resonate, follow Martin Schuster on Instagram and website for new canvases, studio fragments, and show updates as the next tenderly painted catastrophe takes shape.
Enter the worlds he builds. Visit Martin Schuster.
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