Throughout her life, Berlin artist Sarah Schumann (1933–2019) worked on extensive series of works. Over the course of a career spanning more than 60 years, she created numerous groups of collages, paintings, gouaches, and drawings that are fundamentally devoted to the dialectics of beauty and terror.
The focus of this exhibition is on works from the 1990s. During this period, Schumann's numerous trips in Germany and Europe as well as to Kenya and India were especially important. In these large-format paintings and works on paper, the artist worked on the impressions and experiences she had on these journeys, either from memory or with the aid of photographs. All works received lyrical titles applied by her hand, a demonstration of her literary interests that is also reflected in numerous other works.
Galerie Albrecht presents works that show significant historic monuments in parks and cemeteries in Branitz, Potsdam, and Steinhöfel. Schumann's artistic perspective on these historic monuments and the works of the landscape architects Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau and Peter Joseph Lenné reflects her individual attitude to memory and nature. She records the results of her exploration of memorials of human action and artistic activity in nature in drawings, paintings, and texts.
Sarah Schumann, born in 1933 as Maria Schirmer in Berlin, where she also died in 2019, grew up as the daughter of sculptor parents. Her childhood was marked by deprivation, and she was forced to be quite independent. She left home rather young; and self-taught, she developed her own style for her collages and paintings early on. Briefly married to the Hamburg gallerist Hans Brockstedt, she changed her name to Maria Brockstedt. From 1960 to 1963, she lived and worked in London, where her later name Sarah Schumann came about. Later, she moved to the Piedmont region in Italy.
In 1968 she moved back to Berlin, where she lived through and participated in the social upheavals, and in 1972 joined the feminist group Brot+Rosen. Schumann was a co-curator of the important exhibition Künstlerinnen international 1877-1977, which for the first time presented twentieth-century women artists in Germany, including Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse and Maria Lassnig. In 1977, she received a fellowship for Villa Massimo in Rome. In the 1980s and 90s, she travelled extensively in Germany and throughout the world.
Harun Farocki and Michaela Melián engaged artistically with Sarah Schumann's life and work, and in addition her life partner Silvia Bovenschen (1946– 2017) immortalized her in her book Sarahs Gesetz. Frankfurt's Städel Museum includes her in its oral history project Café Deutschland among the 70 pathbreaking protagonists of the (West) German art world from 1960 onwards.The texts from her estate are now located at the Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the estate of Sarah Schumann, VAN HAM Art Estate Cologne.
Press release courtesy Galerie Albrecht.
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