Interview with Regine Schumann

Q: What is your inspiration?

A: Having the chance to spend my life tackling the daily challenges thrown up by my inner impulses to actively create.

Q: What artists or movements do you see you work as being related to?

A: Early on it was Mark Rothko, then later Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. These figures have always interested me greatly and I feel a real spiritual connection to them.

Q: Could you please describe your technique and process?

A: I work with fluorescent synthetic material – acrylic glass, Plastilight strings and fluorescent and luminescent pigments on paper or metal. I process these materials into transparent “fields of color,” luminescent hand-woven wall hangings or monochrome wall and spatial sculptures.

When subjected to the influence of black light, daylight, or even without any light on them at all, the work’s character undergoes a transformation, lending whichever space or room they are in a new, secretive, atmospheric light. It creates a spatial experience produced by the visible light, by an illumination within, through the apparent melting away of the space’s material, physical presence. Stimulated by the black light, which the eye cannot see, the works’ surfaces give out intensively glowing colors, which evoke a paradoxical yet chromatic aura.

The colored lights produce ambivalent, intermediate states, reflecting quasi-sculptural qualities. Also as a result of the black light, the luminous objects undergo a chameleon-like metamorphosis, transforming themselves into radiant bodies of light and bathing the entire space’s atmosphere in an entirely new hue.

Q: How did you first get involved with art?

A: Even as a child, art always held a magical attraction for me, thanks to the Monchehaus Museum in my hometown of Goslar. I became familiar with amazing art at a very early age.

Q: Who are your favorite artists?

A: In addition to the three artists I mentioned earlier, I also personally appreciate those who have really carved their own direction and whose work surprises us while opening up new experiences and ways of looking at things, for example, Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Sol Lewitt and a lot of artists with whom I actually work.

Q: How has your body of work developed over the course of your career?

A: A common thread runs through all of my work and over the past thirty years, this has become more fully developed, more precise, while also expanding in scope. In the very beginning, I did pencil or watercolor still lifes of glasses and vases; the interaction of color, light, material and space has remained a central focus for me ever since, although three-dimensionality now plays a big role, aimed at getting the observer fully integrated into the works. Doing this creates different sensations within the viewer: they are drawn to rethinking the colors they see, and prompted to reinterpret their own feelings and impressions.

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