In his show Cake (2026) at Sprüth Magers, New York, Andreas Schulze explores the visual effects of saturated color and geometric form, using cake as the setting for his investigation.
In his paintings, Schulze creates an inner three-dimensional universe, which serves as a bell jar. In his imaginary pastures, Schulze creates surreal interiorscapes, built of geometric shapes and flat backdrops of color-gradient skies, juxtaposed with rounded spheres and spirals painted in three-dimensional perspective, with depth and shadow. The pictorial space he builds gives a stage for him to explore various phenomena, in this case, cake, and he does so with a playful seriousness, experimenting with the basic forms and images that make up cakes: candles, frosting, fruit, sprinkles, and layers.
Albeit cake, Schulze’s approach isn’t overly sugary. The visitors may wear a smile while circulating the show, though they are not overstimulated, high on sugar, or oversaturated. Schulze paints in a calm and collected manner, his cakes cool-toned. His aesthetic quality is playful, though not childlike. Whereas a child’s play is characterized by a bodily curious hunger, blurted desires, and feverishness, Schulze’s aesthetic quality is of mature playfulness. He portrays a childlike subject, a cake, but paints it devoutly, like a naive toy store owner might paint a mural on the store’s wall. Thus, the show explores the pleasing effects of cake on the eye, rather than its multi-sensory effects on the body. This allows the cake to exist solely for a visual purpose.
In the realm of color, white swirls and clouds of whipped cream make up half of the pieces. The other half is a balanced play of cool rainbow hues: bright colors whose center of gravity leans toward blue. Icy, sky blue, ochre, champagne, and wood brown cakes, striations, lines, and circular forms in vermillion red, canary yellow, cotton candy pink, pastel, creamy green, kiwi green. The constant play of these myriad vibrant colors, alongside their counterbalancing with white and bluish backdrops, creates a tempting vista, inducing a lingering and ever-returning gaze.
Schulze’s cakes are adorned with dots, candy, sprinkles, wheels, sparklers, squiggles of icing, and layers of sponge cakes in many colors. Some include deflated frosting, multi-layered cake, a lonely cake in a forest at night, or shaped like a train, strawberries, éclairs, clouds of whipped cream, and fruit. He uses these items as figures, ornaments, and formalist elements interchangeably, decorating the painting and the cakes, sometimes even decorating a cake with miniature ones.
There is movement within the vacuum of his paintings: mountainous creaminess, wheels spinning, vortices and spirals, deflation, melting, leaning, receding into the distance, stacking, tilting, angling, and balancing the elements to create a composition. The objects fly and land, like ribbons and sprinkles racing around candles, counterbalanced by grounded cakes and donuts, leaning candles bookended by thick, heavy rainbow cakes.
Andreas Schulze’s Cake is on view at Sprüth Magers (New York), 2 E 80th St, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10075, through July 31, 2026. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am–6 pm, and by appointment.
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About the writer: Sivan Lavie is a poet, visual artist, arts writer and curator based in New York City. Sivan is an arts writer for Whitehot Magazine, Art Spiel and Interlocutor Magazine. She published chapbooks with Inkfish Studio and Earthbound Press, her poetry and short stories appear in Hobart Pulp, SPECTRA Poets, SUDS Zine, KEITH LLC and Happy Apples Press. @s.i.v.a.n.w.o.r.l.d @tinnitus.curator