November 15, 2018 – March 10, 2019
MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art
“A world star from the region” (WAZ, Jens Dirksen)
“I find explanations completely superfluous. If a picture does not immediately touch the viewer, then something is missing.” (Emil Schumacher)
He helped shape the modern concept of freedom in art and sought to connect with international contemporary art at an early stage: Emil Schumacher (1912-1999) is one of the most important artists of German post-war abstraction, who dared to make a radical new start in art after the Second World War and confronted the past with a new visual language. Schumacher was one of the first German artists to show his works abroad as early as the mid-1950s. Later, he repeatedly took part in the documenta.
The Museum Küppersmühle is hosting Emil Schumacher’s largest retrospective in 20 years and the most extensive exhibition to date in his native North Rhine-Westphalia (outside of the Emil Schumacher Museum in Hagen). Around 80 works from five decades are on display. The two oldest pictures in the exhibition date from 1950, the most recent from the year of his death in 1999. There are also interesting links to the museum’s permanent collection: 16 works by Emil Schumacher from the Ströher Collection are presented in the exhibition. The context with other loans creates new perspectives – also on the collection.
Schumacher’s paintings are characterized by an unusually impasto application of paint and the use of found objects such as wood, stones, nails, asphalt or sisal, which expand the associative access to his paintings. “The special thing about Emil Schumacher’s work is the physical presence of his paintings,” emphasizes curator Eva Müller-Remmert. His works are defined by emotional gestures and spontaneous creative processes, the detachment of color from form and line from motif, the violation of the painting surface and the penetration of painting into the third dimension. For Schumacher, the picture support is not a compositional surface, but a space for action, which from the end of the 1950s onwards is sometimes rutted with tools or violently smashed with a hammer. The results are pictures with a primal aura, often reminiscent of archaic natural landscapes and forces. The powerful presence of the works is created by the The artist’s ‘trial of strength’ with the material. It is “Inspiration and resistance at the same time“, as Schumacher himself put it. “The image is formed from the essence, but also from the resistance of the material.”
“EMIL SCHUMACHER. Inspiration and Resistance” is an exhibition of the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur e.V. Bonn (www.stiftungkunst.de) and is made possible by the generous support of the Sparkasse Duisburg and the Stiftung Informelle Kunst. The accompanying catalog is published by Wienand Verlag, the museum edition costs 25 EUR.
Sponsor:
#emilschumacher #inspirationandresistance
Press reviews
WAZ/NRZ, 15.11.18, via WAZplus
Rundschau Duisburg, 15.11.18
Revier Passagen, 15.11.18
Westfälischer Anzeiger, 15.11.18
Kunstgebiet Ruhr, 06.11.18 (see also NRZ, 27.11.18)
Accompanying program
17.01.2019 | 5 pm
ART and ENJOYMENT
Guided tour of the exhibition, followed by wine and snacks in the Küppersmühle Restaurant
With Sabine Falkenbach and Jörg Mascherrek
EUR 21 incl. admission, guided tour, a drink and snacks
03.02.2019 | 11 a. m.
ART meets … RESISTANCE
How up-to-date is Emil Schumacher?
As an artist, Emil Schumacher set out to “smash the stink of the past”. As with other representatives of European Informel, his paintings were created as a reaction to the horrors of World War II, as a rebellion against the restrictions of the Nazi era, and as an expression of an irrepressible striving for freedom. At the same time, Schumacher’s painting is a constant struggle with the resistance of the material, with color and the medium, with the processes and conditions of its creation – fundamental questions of art. So how can Schumacher’s work be classified today? Historic or still relevant? What role does the artist play in the development of German art after 1945? What makes his work?
These and other questions will be discussed by Till Breckner (gallery owner), Katharina Henkel (art historian), Peter Iden (art critic), Eva Müller-Remmert (curator of the exhibition), Christian Spies (Professor of Art History, University of Cologne). Moderator: Walter Smerling (Director MKM)
10 EUR incl. Admission to the MKM
14.02.2019 | 6.30 pm
PAINTING IS ENHANCED LIFE
Paintings, texts and a film. An evening about Emil Schumacher
With Sabine Falkenbach and Jörg Mascherrek
EUR 10 incl. Admission to the MKM
17.02.2019 | 11.00 a.m.
BAZON BROCK’SVISITORS’ SCHOOL
Bazon Brock, self-proclaimed “thinker on duty” and “artist without a work” as well as professor emeritus of aesthetics, is once again inviting visitors to the MKM’s Visitors’ School. His guided tours beyond classical mediation have been legendary since he first conducted them at the documenta in 1968. In the current exhibition, he focuses on Emil Schumacher’s oeuvre in his unconventional observations and offers tangible facts, profound chains of thought and an entertaining form of lecture.
10 EUR incl. admission. Admission to the MKM
Registration
T 0203 30 19 48 -11 (Wed-Sun) or office@xn--kp-xka.vereda.de
Note
Please note that on evening dates, a visit to the exhibition is only possible before the start of the event and not afterwards.
Title: Emil Schumacher, Atlanta I, 1987 (detail), MKM Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg, Ströher Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018
Opening photos: Georg Lukas, Essen
