Regine Schumann’s objects derive their beauty and magic from the interaction of light, colour, material and space. The artist almost always uses materials that light up the moment they are exposed to radiant energy. In recent years she has worked with fluorescent plastic cords, pigments, and paper, but her real favourite is fluorescent acrylic glass. Through her intense involvement with luminescent materials and the different ways they react to daylight or black light, she has made the chameleon-like transformations these objects undergo a fundamental feature of her art, and often themed it over the years.

Her colormirror farbrausch III [color mirror blaze of colour III] is one of a series that Schumann commenced in 2010 consisting of identical square picture boxes, which she initially did in four different colours. While for a long time her luminous objects were made of transparent acrylic glass panes, here for the first time she has employed coloured acrylic glass with a satin finish, which gives the works a particularly velvety look. With her keen eye for colour and colour effects, she explores the possibilities presented by the translucent material. Although Schumann usually entrusts the manufacture of her acrylic glass objects to a specialist processing company, to this day she has remained a painter through and through. In keeping with this, colormirror farbrausch III adheres to painterly principles: she has combined the satined front plane with transparent sides and a rear wall done in shimmering gold metallic pigment, which reflects the incoming light and heightens the object’s energetic character. Colour and light merge in the piece to produce a sensual red colour space that radiates out over the exhibition gallery.

Even normal daylight or artificial lighting sets the large picture box aglow, but its true radiance first reveals itself in black light: These ultraviolet rays stimulate the fluorescent material to actively light up, and transform the work into an intensive glowing colour body. In the darkness of the black light, colormirror farbrausch III appears like a luminous spherical object whose contours and surfaces seem to dissolve into iridescent coloured light. At that point the work is scarcely perceptible any more as a material presence. With her concept, Regine Schumann has succeeded in performing a tightrope walk between the concrete physical object and its perceptual dissolution into a highly fascinating, auratic light phenomenon.

Regine Schumann

1961 born in Goslar
Lives and works in Cologne