Artist

Emil Schumacher

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Part of events on ArtRabbit in: Berlin

Emil Schumacher is also highly regarded internationally as one of the most important representatives of German Informel. As early as the 1950s, influenced by French Tachism and American Action Painting, he developed an independent abstract painting style. In his painting, he traced matter and colour to a particular extent. He applied paint thickly as a layer of material to the picture support, into which he drew flowing line scaffolds of trenches and furrows that flow through the picture like wild rivers through the soil, tearing open the earth's crust and lending the pictures eruptive power, but also vulnerability. However, everyday materials such as wire mesh, crumpled paper, stones, straw, metal or sand were also used as poetic pictorial substance. Thus Schumacher's pictures repeatedly recall the history of the earth, primeval geological conditions of the cooled earth, volcanic incrustations with uplifted horizons. In the mid-1970s, he began to smash chunks of asphalt, softening them with heat in order to bend them with a hammer and merge them with the picture ground. His late work is characterised on the one hand by increasing formal sparseness, but also by powerful, luminous colour fields and disruptive lines of movement. The Emil Schumacher Museum opened in Hagen in 2009.

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