Emil Schumacher's work saw a radical transition in the 1950s, a transition that should make him one of the most important representaives of the German Informel. He abandoned the object as image motif and put sole focus on the color's expressive force. This artistic development was in line with a contemporary tendency coined by the French École de Paris, Tachism and American Action-Painting. While works from the first half of the 1950s still show the gestural means of expression of Tachism, Schumacher attained his very own abstract pictorial language by the end of the decade: The dualism of background and form was increasingly abandoned and the compositional arrangement gave way to a homogenous color layer. Schumacher's canvasses gained in plasticity. Just as this work is an example of, the picture is no longer seen in a Renaissance sense as a window looking into a painted reality, instead it is bearer of a haptically perceptible color mentality. Schumacher leaves a high degree of freedom to the color, he allows it to develop a sort of own character. In order to attain highest possible materiality, Schumacher mixes the colors with sand - as it is the case in our large-size work - before he applies it onto the image carrier in thick layers. Schumacher's manner of paitning is chraracterized by a high degree of momentum and intrinsic rules, which the artist described as follows: "It ususally starts with a slight push of the brush dipped in the paint [..], or with chalks, and then there is no stopping. I am entirely in it and everything else is the result of my actions" (quote from: Emil Schumacher, ex. cat. Annamarie M. Andersen Kunsthandel, Zürich 1993, p. 4). Works by Emil Schumacher can be found in many acclaimed private and public collections, anong them the Tate Collection, London, the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Vienna and the Sprengel Museum, Hanover. [JS]