Emil Schumache — Abstract Expressionism
“Emil Schumacher, born in the Westphalian town of Hagen in 1912, began a three-year degree at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dortmund when he was 20 years old. He started working as an independent artist in 1935 and founded the artist and exhibition association “junger westen” in 1947 together with a few other artists. The style of his work changed drastically in 1950.
He abandoned painting objects and turned towards the expressive power of painting alone. Colour itself gradually became the decisive element of his works. This biographical artistic process happened during a period, which was determined by the French École de Paris, Tachism and American Action Painting. While abstraction itself was typical of this period, it also became a typical aspect of Emil Schumacher’s personal style.During the late 1960s and early 1970s Schumacher experimented with a rigorous type of action painting, which is reflected above all in his “Hammerbilder” (Hammer Paintings). The injury and damage to the picture support was to him a means of employing destruction itself as a pictorial phenomenon in art. After exhibiting at the “documenta III” in Kassel in 1964 he created extremely large works, which manifest an extreme painterly freedom. This phase lasted until the 1980s. His latest works of the 1990s, with figurative reminiscences, have clearly overcome the contrast between abstraction and the figurative.”
