Emil Schumacher

Using thick impasto layers of paint and multiple overpaintings, he created reliefs of paint, which he then extended three-dimensionally with the use of plaster, wire, and papier-mâché (“Tactile Objects”, 1956/57). From 1957, in his “Crater Landscapes”, he inserted black lines into the red, brown and black crusts of paint. His large-format paintings are a special material-focused form of German Informalism with its own gestural brushstroke. Later, his range of colours became lighter, brighter and eventually louder and more diverse. As well as paintings, he produced collages, drawings and gouaches. In his “Hammer Pictures” he destroyed wooden door panels with a hammer. Landscapes can be found in his art quite early, in his Djerba series, from 1969. From the 1990s, he added further representational subjects. From 1958 to 1960 Schumacher held a professorship at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg, from 1966 to 1977 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, and in 1967/68 at the Minneapolis School of Art. His paintings were presented at documenta 2, 3 and 6. A retrospective was held at the Haus der Kunst (House of Art) in Munich in 1998.