Regula Humm The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos

In the last years, we have been producing solo exhibitions at der TANK of elderly Swiss artists whose works have rarely been exhibited: Peter Klein (2022), Annette Barcelo (2023), and now Regula Humm constitute a sort of trilogy. Exhibiting these practices creates a necessary space for opening up to complexity. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos presents four significant large-scale textile works and a selection of paintings and drawings by Regula Humm (born 1929 in Wädenswil) in an exhibition display by Kathrin Siegrist (lives in Basel). During the many decades that followed her graduation from the School of Applied Arts in Zurich (today Zurich University of Arts) in the late 1940s, Regula Humm has been exploring the complex wax-resist technique, a batik method. She developed a way of creating intricate scenes and narratives on a light material, easy to manipulate allowing her to address complex questions. Inherited myths, current discourses, mental processes, and narratives that allow to transmit a story, a message, and values are essential to her practice. The spatial intervention by Kathrin Siegrist made of modified and dyed parachute fabrics functions at der TANK as a ceiling that encloses Regula Humm’s works and protects them. To both artists, light fabric is a medium of feminist dissent. Marginalized and feminized, the textile worlds of Regula Humm emerge with an intellectual and political ambition that is distinctive. Returning to tactility and physical intimacy equals in her work a contemporary reflection of the screen as skin that we touch in devices all day.