Emil Schumacher, Original Terragraph from the Book of Genesis, 1998, No. 3

Emil Schumacher
Hagen 1912 - 1999 San José/Ibiza

Genesis, Sheet 3

Terragraphy on heavy laid paper
Size: 40.5 x 40 cm
Frame: 47 x 47 cm
from an edition of 120 unsigned copies (plus 20 Roman-numbered and signed copies)
Very good condition (see photos)

Modern frame with museum glass, suspended from a backing.



Authenticity will be confirmed in writing.

Schumacher's "Genesis" (Chapters I to XII) comprises 18 original prints. Created by Emil Schumacher in the winter of 1998 in his Hagen studio on acetate printing plates, the prints were produced in Jaffa, Tel Aviv – using desert sand from Israel. The Genesis series was created less than a year before Schumacher's death and demonstrates the immense creative power that persisted into his later work. Based on his own intensive reading of Luther's text, the artist developed Genesis with his own distinctive expressiveness. For these prints, Emil Schumacher employed the special printmaking technique of terragraphy. This makes it a truly unique work by the artist, who, from the beginning of his professional training as a graphic artist at the School of Applied Arts in Dortmund and throughout his entire artistic career of over 60 years, engaged intensively with printmaking and paper, as well as the materiality of his medium, color. The special hand-printing process of serigraphs using the terragraphy technique allows for the printing of three-dimensional surfaces and is particularly well-suited to Schumacher's work. The Genesis series, created in his Hagen studio in 1998, represents a synthesis of Schumacher's entire oeuvre.

Emil Schumacher, born in Hagen, Westphalia, in 1912, began a three-year course of study at the School of Applied Arts in Dortmund at the age of 20. He worked as a freelance painter from 1935 onward, and in 1947, Schumacher and several fellow painters founded the artists' and exhibition association "junger westen" (young west). from 1950 onward, Schumacher's work underwent a radical transformation. He abandoned the representational subject as a pictorial motif and opted for the expressive power of painting itself. Color increasingly became an independent pictorial element. This biographical and artistic process unfolded against the backdrop of a contemporary style influenced by the French École de Paris, Tachisme, and American Action Painting. While abstraction was, on the one hand, a sign of the times, for Schumacher it also became a hallmark of his personal style. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Schumacher experimented with a rigorous form of activism, primarily expressed in his "hammer paintings." The injury and damage to the support allowed him to employ destruction itself as a means of artistic expression. from his participation in documenta III in Kassel in 1964 until the 1980s, he created extremely large-format paintings that manifested a remarkable painterly freedom. In his later works from the 1990s, which clearly incorporate representational elements, Schumacher transcended the dichotomy between abstraction and figuration. Since the mid-1950s, he has enjoyed international acclaim as one of the most important representatives of Art Informel. Schumacher's work has been honored with numerous international awards, the Guggenheim Award in New York in 1958 being just the first of many. In the same year, he was appointed professor at the Hamburg University of Fine 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 USA. 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 in Munich, Emil Schumacher died on October 4, 1999, in San Jose.