Painter Andreas Schulze Opens His Hoard of Spritzdekor Ceramics

The painter Andreas Schulze has shared his collection of hundreds of airbrushed ceramic pieces, a body of objects known to collectors as Spritzdekor ceramics.

Schulze is known first as a painter. The collection places his private passion for decorated ceramics before an audience that usually meets him through canvas. The word Spritzdekor names the technique at the heart of the holdings: decoration applied with an airbrush, producing soft gradations of color on ceramic surfaces.

The scale is the story's hardest fact. We are not talking about a shelf of souvenirs. Hundreds of pieces make this a collection in the serious sense, assembled piece by piece by a working artist.

What does this change for viewers?

It offers a rare view of how a painter looks at objects. A collection built by an artist follows the eye, not the market. Schulze's hundreds of airbrushed ceramics show what he chose to live with, and the decorative language of Spritzdekor — sprayed color, tonal transitions, graphic edges — sits close to the vocabulary of painting itself.

For collectors and scholars of twentieth-century ceramics, the public sharing of a private holding matters. Collections that stay behind closed doors inform no one. Collections that surface give the field new material to study, compare and date.

For Schulze's own audience, the collection reframes the painter. An artist's taste in objects is a kind of self-portrait. Hundreds of choices, repeated over years, tell us something his paintings alone cannot.

Why airbrushed ceramics?

The airbrush lends ceramic decoration a quality brushes struggle to reach: even, misted fields of color with no visible stroke. That quality made Spritzdekor a distinctive chapter in ceramic history, and it is precisely a painter's technique translated into fired glaze.

Schulze's dual practice — painting on one side, collecting sprayed ceramics on the other — suggests the two feed each other. The collection functions as an extended study in applied color, kept within reach of the studio.

How the collection will be shown, and where, remains the open question. Its public appearance already accomplishes something: it converts a private obsession into a shared resource, and it invites a new reading of Andreas Schulze as both maker and keeper of images.