Sarah Schumann: Shock and Beauty

January 14 - February 8, 2025
Overview
Sarah Shumann, 'erst fades weiß, dann dieser Plüsch (first bland white, then this Plush),' 1981 (Courtesy the artist and Van Ham Art Estate, Cologne)
Sarah Shumann, 'erst fades weiß, dann dieser Plüsch (first bland white, then this Plush),' 1981 (Courtesy the artist and Van Ham Art Estate, Cologne)

‘Women, in more or less abstract landscapes, are the subject of many of my works,’ Schumann noted in 1975. ‘There are biographical reasons for this - but I am also of the opinion that under today’s production conditions, no female artist can spare herself the discussion about the relationship between her art and her gender, it is a necessary part of her work.’

A solo exhibition of photographs, collages, and paintings by Sarah Schumann (GER, 1933-2019), a Surrealist feminist artist who was based in Berlin until her death in 2019. A figurative painter and collagist, Schumann drew on her personal life as a queer artist to create heroic depictions of women in post-war Europe. A collaboration with the Van Ham Art Estate in Cologne, our gallery presentation of significant works from 1959-1998 is Schumann’s debut in Los Angeles.

 

The exhibition, which includes film and video, opens to the public on Tuesday, January 14th.  There is an opening reception on Saturday, January 18th from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm.

 

A film – An Image by Sarah Schumann, (1978) – will be shown during the run of the exhibition. Directed by Harun Farocki (1944 - 2014), the documentary chronicles Schumann as she makes a single work over a nine week period. Additionally, Schumann's final interview – A Conversation between Sarah Schumann and Bettina Böttinger, 2019 – will be screened in tandem with the film. 

 

For over 60 years (1953 – 2024), Schumann received numerous solo exhibitions throughout Germany, notably in Berlin at KUNSTstätte Dorothea, Galerie Albrecht, and Galerie am Savignyplatz; in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Art/ICA (1962); and throughout Europe. Recently, Schumann was included in Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 (2023), Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; and Lesbian Visions (2018), Schwules Museum, Berlin. The artist’s paintings and collages are in the permanent collection of the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Morsbroich Museum, Leverkusen; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, and others. 

 

Sarah Schuman, who died in Berlin at the age of 85 in 2019, described herself as ‘a courageous, strong, combative artist.’ In her last interview, which Bettina Böttinger had conducted with her a few months earlier, she explained ‘Beauty alone is not enough.’

 

 

 

An Image by Sarah Schumann, (1978): Courtesy Antje Ehmann and the Farocki Foundation 

A Conversation between Sarah Schumann and Bettina Böttinger, 2019: Courtesy Van Ham Art Estate

Works
News
Press release
Diane Rosenstein Gallery announces Shock and Beauty, a solo exhibition of photographs, collages, and paintings by Sarah Schumann (GER, 1933-2019), a Surrealist feminist artist who was based in Berlin. A figurative painter and collagist, Schumann drew on her personal life as a queer artist to create heroic depictions of women in post-war Europe. Our gallery presentation of significant works from 1959-1998, a collaboration with the Van Ham Art Estate in Cologne, is Schumann’s debut in Los Angeles.
 
‘Women, in more or less abstract landscapes, are the subject of many of my works,’ Schumann noted in 1975. ‘There are biographical reasons for this - but I am also of the opinion that under today’s production conditions, no female artist can spare herself the discussion about the relationship between her art and her gender, it is a necessary part of her work.’
 
The exhibition includes film and video: An Image by Sarah Schumann, a documentary directed by Harun Farocki (1978), was filmed over a nine week period and chronicles Schumann as she makes a single work. Schumann's final interview – A Conversation between Sarah Schumann and Bettina Böttinger (2019) – will be screened in tandem with the film.
 
As a painter and collagist, Sarah Schumann is considered one of the most important exponents of post-war Modernism and engaged themes of “schrecken und schönheit” (horror and beauty) in her figurative works. Historian Vojin Saša Vukadinović wrote, in the obituary (for Texte zur Kunst), “Sarah Schumann was - there is no other way to put it - a singular phenomenon.” Raised in Berlin, she was ‘self-taught’ by necessity – neither Schumann nor her artist parents could afford tuition for an art academy. As a child refugee, she often experienced hunger,which contributed to health challenges later in life. Nevertheless, by the age of 20, in the early 1950s, Schumann began exhibiting works which ran completely counter to the ideal world of post-war conservatism in West German society.
 
Vukadinović observed that ‘At a time when no one wanted to be reminded of the recent past, these [shock collages] reminded us in a completely undidactic way that beneath the wafer-thin foundation of civilization lies the incomprehensible.’ These early “Schock-Collagen” reflect her childhood in the Second World War and the experiences of her youth in the post war era.
 
By 1962, Schumann received a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, with painting, mixed-media collages, and introduced Marilyn Monroe as an early motif. In 1968, Schumann returned to West Berlin and became very actively involved in the early stages of the new Feminist movement. She joined Bread + Roses (Brot + Rosen), a significant feminist artist and activist collective in 1971; then co-curated Women Artists International 1877-1977, a landmark feminist survey. In the mid 1970s, she met the writer Silvia Bovenschen, who became her life partner, and Schumann incorporated images of Silvia in significant paintings and gouaches throughout their lives.
 
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Schumann began to paint and create elaborate surrealist mixed-media collages. These ‘collages from the 1970s placed women at the center of the image in order to broaden that very meaning,’ Vukadinović notes. ‘Flowers, leaves and hair, chiffon, velvet and brocade were integrated into compositions that seemed like a twilight state of reality: Not unlike sensory illusions or incipient dreams, they placed the emphasis on an at times morbidly enraptured femininity, which here remained intangible in the literal sense, almost eliciting its potency in the unconscious.’
 
Currently, Sarah Schumann is included in InformELLEs: Women Artists and Art Informel in the 1950s/60s, a group exhibition in Germany at the Hessen Kassel Heritage. Her work was included in Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 (2023), Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; and Lesbian Visions (2018), Schwules Museum, Berlin. For over 60 years (1953 – 2024), she received numerous solo exhibitions throughout Germany, notably in Berlin at KUNSTstätte Dorothea, Galerie Albrecht, and Galerie am Savignyplatz; in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Art/ICA (1962); and throughout Europe.  The artist’s paintings and collages are in the permanent collection of the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Morsbroich Museum, Leverkusen; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, and others.
 
Diane Rosenstein Gallery thanks Antje Ehmann and the Farocki Foundation for permission to screen An Image by Sarah Schumann (1978); and A Conversation between Sarah Schumann and Bettina Böttinger (2019) is courtesy Van Ham Art Estate, Cologne.

 

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