LINGERING LINES

At first we perceive a sea of seemingly chaotic lines, until on closer inspection an ordered structure reveals itself to us. The repeating lines sometimes join to form a grid, sometimes they are crossed by other lines. Forms, signs, symbols emerge that take up the entire canvas space. The forms appear like archaic artefacts with universalist references. Sometimes they seem familiar, sometimes alien. The forms that Schumacher depicts can have different effects depending on how they are understood and are above all multi-perspectival. Schumacher does not prescribe how her works should be read, she leaves them open and thus also open to interpretation. Although she shares her intense preoccupation with the line with abstract modernist painters, she reverses the role of colour as a subordinate pictorial medium. A relationship of dependence develops between colour and line. The preoccupation with the line became an independent and dominant practice in modernist painting, but Schumacher effects the visibility of the line through coloured surfaces. It is only through the constitution of the spaces in between that the lines themselves take shape. The saturated colour becomes a self-conscious appearance, making the line an object of investigation. The line becomes dependent on the bodies of colour that are supposed to form it. It becomes a negative. Through the artistic preoccupation with line and colour, she de-hierarchises the properties of the painterly means and places them on an equal footing. Each work evokes an intense subjective experience within us. We experi- ence her monotypes on a material level, which allows us to grasp specific and powerful gestures. LINGERING LINES means: to echo, to remain, to last. We see lines that are the echo of the colours and their graphic compositions.