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.
Read MoreIn 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) immortalised 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.
Courtesy Galerie Albrecht, Berlin.
