Art Cologne 2025

Regine Schumann 
Solo Show

In collaboration with Taguchi Fine Art, Tokyo

At the core of Regine Schumann’s practice lies a rigorously scientific investigation into colour and light—an inheritance that traces a direct line from Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre to the optical engineering that underpins today’s screen culture. Schumann works almost like a physicist in the studio: isolating variables, measuring spectral behaviour, and exploiting fluorescence, refraction and after-image to reveal the “rules” governing chromatic perception. Yet the resulting sculptures are anything but didactic. Their glow, their slow shifts from daylight clarity to ultraviolet incandescence, invite instinctive, open-ended encounters. In this sense, Schumann embodies the paradox of the best colour-light artists: empirical exactitude yielding universal immediacy.

Her choice of UV-reactive acrylic glass situates the work firmly within a post-industrial chronology—one in which the availability of new, highly engineered materials allowed artists to abandon paint and canvas altogether. From the plastic reliefs of the Zero group to the neon environments of the 1990s, this trajectory intensified over successive decades and reaches a moment of critical mass with Schumann’s generation. Born in 1961—at the edge of the Centre Pompidou’s definition of the “contemporary artist,” which embraces those born from the 1920s through the 1960s—she stands at the threshold, inheriting the rigorous visual research of mid-century pioneers while extending it through 21st-century materials science and industrial fabrication carried out under her own exacting direction.

In sum, our solo presentation offers ART COLOGNE a lucid, research-driven yet sensorially immediate encounter with one of Germany’s foremost colour-light practitioners—strengthened by an unconventional partnership between European and Asian galleries