With "Matora", Emil Schumacher created an extremely sensual blend of form and color in 1966, reducing the compositional means to two key elements: A powerful blue glows from the depths of the pictorial space and is traversed in the foreground by relief-like lines in black and white. The pronounced dialectics of monochrome color surfaces and graphic elements, which are characteristic of works from this creative period, are evident here. The artist deliberately juxtaposed his mostly red, yellow, or blue pigments with hard, black lines. He wrote about the creation of the lines: "The shortest connection between two points is a straight line," says geometry. The shortest connection between two points within the picture can be a curved, intertwined, or even interrupted, but also a straight line. For the measure of the picture is the force that determines the line." (Emil Schumacher, Ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln, Materie, 1972)". In "Matora", the lines follow the elongated painting ground, emphasizing a landscape panorama format. In some cases, the artist digs them into the paint layer with enormous physicality or, as here, applies them in impasto materiality as a second, slightly elevated layer. The result is striking, very physical works that move between painting and relief are fully dedicated to the expressive power of materiality.
At the time "Matora" was created, Emil Schumacher was already one of the most established artists in the international art scene. Since 1950, his work has undergone a radical change. He abandoned the object as a pictorial motif and opted for abstract painting, with color becoming the main pictorial factor. This biographical-artistic process took place against the backdrop of a contemporary style influenced by the French École de Paris, Tachism, and American Action Painting. For Schumacher, abstraction became the hallmark of his signature style. He gained increasing recognition as one of the most important representatives of European Informalism by the mid-1950s. His participation in the Venice Biennale in 1961 and the documenta shows in Kassel in 1958 and 1964 are evidence of his increasing success. He was awarded numerous prizes, including the Guggenheim Award in New York. At the end of the 1950s, he was appointed professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. In 1966, the year "Matora" was created, he accepted a professorship in Karlsruhe, and in 1967 he went to the University of Minneapolis/USA for a year as a visiting professor. One year before his death on October 4, 1999, in San José on Ibiza, he was honored with one last major retrospective during his lifetime - a celebration of his extensive, multifaceted oeuvre in Paris, Hamburg, and Munich. [AR]