Emil Schumacher

born 1912 in Hagen, died 1999 in San José/Ibiza.

Emil Schumacher was faced with the challenge of creating a work able to assert itself against the dominating presence of Norman Foster’s wall panelling located in the conference hall, a challenge he met with “Stations and Times, I–IV” – one of the last works he completed before his death.

Painted in an expressionistic, strongly gestural style on aluminium sheeting, the work’s translucence and cool elegance nevertheless appear to curb its furious energy with graceful ease. A line rising from the first picture and sinking into the last one connects the flow of images across the four ‘stations’. A kind of visual shorthand hints at animals, people and landscapes.

What is intimated in the title is realized in the spiritual, translucent lightness of the work’s linear structure. This four-part cycle is the résumé of an artist’s prolific lifework; it is Schumacher’s legacy, a masterpiece of his later style.