Emil Schumacher has shaped post-war Modernism in Germany like hardly any other artist – a painter who sees the canvas as a battlefield of emotions. His artistic practice underwent a fascinating evolution in which materiality, color, and gesture coalesced into an immediate expression of the existential. Our work “Zargala” is a particularly striking example of this endeavor.
In the 1950s, Schumacher made his international breakthrough under the guise of Art Informel. As early as 1958, he received the Guggenheim Award in New York, which marked the beginning of his unparalleled artistic career. During this period, he moved away from the object as a pictorial motif and embraced the expressive power of painting itself. Color increasingly became a pictorial element in its own right. This biographical and artistic process unfolded against the backdrop of a contemporary style shaped by the French École de Paris, Tachism, and American Action Painting. While abstraction was, on the one hand, a sign of the times, for Schumacher it became, on the other hand, a hallmark of his personal signature, his style. A defining feature of his distinctive painting style is a formal language liberated from representationalism, which, on the one hand, appears highly intuitive, yet also deliberately uses controlled chance. The 1960s brought a consolidation of his style: earthy tones, cracked surfaces, and organic forms turned the canvas into a geological landscape. Schumacher processes, destroys, and reconstructs works that are fraught with a tension that lies between creation and decay. This approach became more radical in the 1970s. His palette darkened toward black, deep blue, and rust red, while the surfaces of his paintings evolved into shreds of relics. Our work “Zargala” from 1976 is a particularly striking example of this almost apocalyptic visual language. Ragged structures in black and white burn themselves into a dark red, volcanic pictorial field, leaving wounds. Despite this somber, mysterious aura, this work testifies to the vitality and power typical of Schumacher. Once more, the protagonist of Art Informel provokes the viewer with “Zargala.” [AW]