Regula Humm: The Hidden Heart Of The Cosmos

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In the last years, we have been presenting at der TANK exhibitions of elderly Swiss artists whose works have rarely been exhibited and which coincides with Art Basel in June: Peter Klein (2022), Annette Barcelo (2023), and now Regula Humm constitute a sort of trilogy. At der TANK we have been actively creating a program in response to the importance of overlooked artists, a program aware of the ways certain artistic languages have been neglected. Exhibiting these practices creates a necessary space within art education and art exhibiting institutions for embracing complexity. 
 
The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos 2 presents four very significant textile works and a selection of mostly recent paintings and drawings by artist Regula Humm (born in 1929 in Wädenswil) in an exhibition display created for this occasion by artist Kathrin Siegrist (lives in Basel). Die fünf Fragen (The Five Questions, 2002), one of Regula Humm’s most emblematic series of works proposes, as the title says, an inquiry into the nature of energy. Earth energy and the human eagerness to possess it, to “extract” it; spiritual energy; cosmic energy; artificially produced energies and the climate. The series Sonnentriptychon (Sun tryptic, 1995) delves into the life of the start we are all dependent on. While the single textile piece Winter (2013) addresses the reversal of the light and the warmth into a stop motion of life, Müller (Miller, 2000), also a textile work, reflects on agriculture. During the many decades that followed her graduation from the School of Applied Arts in Zurich (today Zurich University of Arts) in the late 1940s, Regula Humm dedicated herself to exploring the complex wax-resist technique, a batik method.