The painter and graphic artist Emil Schumacher, born in Hagen in 1912 and died in Ibiza in 1999, is one of the most important representatives of the German Informel and the post-war avant-garde.

After the war and fascism, Emil Schumacher took the concept of a new beginning literally and dared to make a radical fresh start. Inspired by the art of the Nouvelle École de Paris and American Action Painting, he abandoned figurative painting and embraced the expressive power of painting itself. The decoupling of color from form, of line from motif, the spontaneity of painting, the disruption of the surface, and the use of materials such as stone, charcoal, lead, asphalt, and sisal became hallmarks of his art from that moment on. From 1990 onward, he integrated pictorial elements into his designs that evoked objects or figures, and in his later work, he transcended the dichotomy between abstraction and figuration.

Paper was one of Emil Schumacher's preferred materials from the very beginning. The technically gifted artist was acutely aware of all the advantages and possibilities paper offered as a medium. Printmaking was the first discipline to which the young Schumacher devoted himself in depth: he mastered the craft after studying free printmaking at the School of Applied Arts in Dortmund. Throughout his career, he continued to explore the possibilities of the medium. The result is a spectacular oeuvre, whose various genres are closely interwoven. Emil Schumacher's works on paper and his prints possess a similar tactile sensuality as his large-scale works on wood or canvas; the directness of his gestural style is equally present in both large and small formats.

Since the mid-1950s, Emil Schumacher has enjoyed international recognition as one of the most important representatives of Art Informel. His work has been recognized with numerous international awards, of which the Guggenheim Award in New York in 1958 was just the beginning. That same year, he was appointed professor at the Hamburg University of the Arts. In 1966, he accepted a professorship in Karlsruhe, and in 1967, he spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of Minneapolis in the United States.

In 1998, the German Bundestag honored him with a commission for a mural in the Reichstag building in Berlin. A year after the major retrospective exhibition in Munich, Emil Schumacher died on October 4, 1999, in San Jose.

The work of Emil Schumacher can be classified as Informel Art, a 20th-century painting style that dominated the art world from 1945 to 1960. In 1950, at his exhibition Véhémences confrontées, the French essayist Michel Tapié introduced the concept of art informel ('art without form'), describing informal painting as a style that focuses exclusively on the act of painting, and in which legible symbols emerge only during that process, whether spontaneous or not.

Exhibited at:
Galerie Hans Strelow, Schumacher – Späte Bilder, 13 mai – 25 june 1989, Cat. Nr. 152