Sale: 541 / Contemporary Art Day Sale, June 09. 2023 in Munich Lot 130

 

130
Emil Schumacher
Abakir, 1965.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 40,000 / $ 43,200
Sold:
€ 50,800 / $ 54,864

(incl. surcharge)
Abakir. 1965.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated in bottom center (scratched into the wet paint). Signed and titled on the reverse. 70 x 50 cm (27.5 x 19.6 in).

• Red is not just a color for Emil Schumacher, it is a red, tangible material.
• Profound work by one of the most important protagonists of German Informalism.
• The artist participated in documenta II, III and 6 in Kassel in 1959, 1964 and 1977
.

The work is registered in the archive with the number 0/2 and will be included into the forthcoming catalogue raisonné.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne (with a label on the reverse).
Private collection Carsten and Charlotte Grodtmann, Switzerland (acquired in 1971, ever since family-owned).

EXHIBITION: Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne.

Emil Schumacher's paintings are characterized by painting with the material. He immerses himself in the paint, changes its consistency to an earthy tone and uses it to model the pictorial form. Several layers of red-orange penetrate a volcanic black. In doing so, he embarks on a creative path that will ultimately lead to the rigorous activism of the "hammer pictures" and the destruction and damage of the image carrier. In his works from the mid-1960s, Emil Schumacher abolished the dualism of ground and painterly form, he displaces the compositional structure in favor of a homogeneous layer of paint. The canvas gains in plasticity through brute surface treatment, here with a deep, wide furrow around the central red. Color no longer has a purely color-giving function, but receives a dynamic that speaks for itself through the immanent materiality. [EH]



130
Emil Schumacher
Abakir, 1965.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 40,000 / $ 43,200
Sold:
€ 50,800 / $ 54,864

(incl. surcharge)